


Nightmares

by howldax



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game), Saw (Movies)
Genre: Blood, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreams, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lesbian Character, Nonbinary Character, OCD, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Romance, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2020-01-13 08:43:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 43,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18465457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howldax/pseuds/howldax
Summary: The arrival of Freddy Kreuger and his powers of dream manipulation into the Entity's realm thin some barriers nobody ever thought could be thinned, and discoveries are made about the people sharing the Fog with each other.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys! sorry for flitting from fandom to fandom, as usual, but dbd owns my ass and there's currently almost 20k of this written so it's looking good! there's canon-typical violence, injury and character death in here throughout, and a brief mention of animal (cat) death in the first paragraph, if anyone wants to skip that (lmk if any other warnings should be added!). while currently the focus is on character development and friendships within the survivor group i expect that there'll be romantic relationships later on in the fic, because i'm a hopeless romantic and a giant lesbian, so hmu if there's anyone you'd like to see more of. thanks for reading!!

The first Nightmare comes a few nights after Quentin arrives at the campfire, pale and scared, his eyes dark and perpetually half-lidded in his face. They’ve all had nightmares, of course, but there’s something less terrifying about dying in a dream when you’re trapped somewhere that kills you most days anyway. Claudette woke up crying once from a dream where she, helpless and incorporeal, watched as her cat starved in her apartment, trapped alone there because she had nobody who would come looking when the Entity took her. It had taken days for her to stop shaking, and sometimes they still find her crying curled up in the twisted roots of one of the huge trees by the campfire, but the nightmares prey on her sadness rather than her fear.

Meg dreams about running, about hiding, about her mother’s face twisted into that of a monster, one of the killers who chase them down. It stopped being scary after a while. Jake says he doesn’t dream, just sleeps and then wakes up without incident, but Dwight whispered to Meg that once Jake woke him up whimpering in his sleep. Neither of them know what he might have been dreaming about – Jake is cagey about himself in every way, doesn’t like to tell them anything – but Meg’s been keeping an eye on him ever since. Even a lone wolf needs someone to watch his back.

Anyway. There’s a difference between a nightmare, and a Nightmare. Regular nightmares have lost their sting, stopped being as scary as they were before the Entity, but Nightmares… they’re something else, something deeper, darker.

Meg has the first Nightmare, before they all really know there’s something different about these ones. She falls asleep as usual, her exhaustion pulling her into sleep, and is almost immediately dreaming, but not a dream she recognises. Her good dreams are generally fairly mundane, if a bit abstract; her nightmares horrific but predictable, recognisable within the first few moments as the same fears repeat themselves. She’s one of those people who knows she’s dreaming but can’t change the dream’s course, and who remembers every dream she has whether she wants to or not.

This dream is somewhere she’s never been before – or maybe she has, but not this specific place. The grey concrete of the floor and walls remind her immediately of the Game, but if it is the Game, she’s never seen this area before. Or…

She brushes her fingers along medical diagrams, mechanical blueprints and scrawled notes on thick paper, tracing the lines. This room is familiar, but not as it is now. The room she knows – has run through, bled in, died in – is a blank canvas, the tables covered in papers with notes faded beyond readability, but this one is covered in clear notes and metal components, very obviously lived in. Several mannequins in various stages of disassembly are wearing some nasty looking shit that reminds Meg of the Pig’s traps, and then – yeah, a bust wearing one of them is tilted against a wall. There’s no blood on the floor, some cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling but everything else well-kept and at least mostly clean. Lived-in. Is this some kind of Entity bullshit? Meg wonders. What reason could it have for showing her this?

A gunshot followed by a scream echoes through the air, and Meg ducks out of instinct, crouching behind one of the tables and almost knocking over a mannequin with metal wrapped around its torso like ribs.

“John, please!” cries a feminine voice, high with pain and distress, and Meg begins to creep closer. If this is some kind of new trial, or perhaps a way to introduce a new survivor, she’d better get as much information as she can and maybe help this woman, whoever she is.

“The rules were clear,” a man’s voice says. “I gave you a second chance, Amanda. I gave you a new life, a new purpose. But you were not willing to follow the rules.”

“I d… I didn’t… she wasn’t,” the woman – Amanda - stutters, but Meg recognises with dread the sound of a voice stifled by blood. Whoever she is, she’s dying.

“You mean nothing to me,” says the man, and Meg can hear Amanda let out an anguished noise. “How could I love you, when you appointed yourself judge, jury and executioner? When you disregarded the rules so easily? You are a murderer, Amanda, and I hate murderers. I despise you.”

Meg moves closer, feeling her way tentatively around the table and darting across a gap towards the voices. Strips of clear plastic block a doorway, but she can see the vague outline of a man sat on something, his outstretched hand pointing a gun. After a moment she realises Amanda is curled against a wall, or maybe a table, she can’t be sure – she’s on the floor, either way, and Meg feels a stab of pity for this stranger, who’s in a situation she’s found herself far too many times.

Hopefully the Entity isn’t bringing fucking guns into this hellhole, though. That would be ridiculously unfair, even more than it already is. Meg’s died enough times that the thought of it doesn’t particularly faze her anymore, but knowing that escape is a possibility if you just stay out of reach always makes the trials easier to bear. You can’t really dodge a bullet.

“I tried,” Amanda says. “I wanted to be g-good, I w… I couldn’t…”

“You’re weak, Amanda,” says the man. “Pathetic. You killed my child, and you killed me, and you have killed us all. You are nothing.”

Another gunshot rings out, Meg flinching back at the sound, and blood spatters across the plastic blocking the doorway. Amanda’s body slumps to the floor, and the room is engulfed in a familiar fog. This is a new situation, a new thing to fear; Meg crawls quickly under a table and covers her head with her arms, hoping the Fog won’t notice her presence if she stays still enough. It’s worked with killers before, at least.

The Fog pulls back with a noise like nails on a chalkboard – Meg winces – and reveals the same room, seemingly unchanged. Meg peers out from underneath the table and squints. The blood across the plastic is gone, as though it was never there, and the man is lying down in the bed now. The doors at the other end of the room swing open loudly and a woman walks through.

She has pale skin, perhaps even paler than Nea, and has sleek dark hair past her shoulders. Her face isn’t conventionally beautiful, but there’s something mesmerising about her sharp features and dark eyes that makes Meg want to step closer. “Amanda?” she whispers. Amanda pauses.

“Who’s there?” she asks. “Hoffman, if you’re trying to pull off some bullshit, you know John doesn’t like that. And you don’t scare me, you know that, right?”

Meg hesitates, then stands, raising her hands in placation when Amanda whips around, her hand immediately reaching for a screwdriver on the table in front of her. “Hey,” she says softly. “I don’t want to hurt you, I-“

“Who the fuck are you?” Amanda asks; her dark eyes are bright with unconcealed hostility. “John would’ve told me about another apprentice. How did you get in here?” She’s prowling forwards, screwdriver held tight. Meg takes a step back.

“My name is Meg,” Meg says. “Listen, don’t go in that room. If you do he kills you, I think. I don’t know if it’ll happen the same way it did before, but that’s what happened last time, and if I can stop anyone else dying in this godforsaken place then I’m gonna try.”

Amanda rolls her eyes. “John wouldn’t hurt me,” she says, as though talking to an idiot. “He saved me. He… he fixed me.” Her hand flexes around the screwdriver. “He _saved_ me.”

“Saved you from what?” Meg asks. Amanda stops moving forwards.

“From myself,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “He saved me from my own pitiful life. I was ruining it, ruining everything I touched like a disease, but now I help him carry out his work, and I’ll carry on his legacy when he dies, and he’ll live on in me. I have a purpose now.”

“You’re gonna _die_ ,” Meg says. Amanda shrugs.

“Someday, sure,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. I know the cure for death, Meg. Do you wanna hear it?”

“There’s no such thing,” Meg says easily. “You can’t escape death.”

“The cure for death is immortality,” Amanda says. “I will be John’s cure.”

“Please listen to me,” Meg says urgently. “If you go into that room, you’ll die.”

“I’m not the one dying today,” Amanda says, a sharp smile curling her lips. “This isn’t my game.”

Meg wakes up moments before the tip of the screwdriver would have pierced her skin, and is convinced that somehow if she’d died in this dream, she wouldn’t have ever come back.

\--

Meg tells Dwight and Laurie about the dream – they’re the ones awake to see her startle into consciousness as the dream ends, and she has to talk about it to someone. Dwight shakes his head.

“That sounds terrible, Meg, I’m really sorry,” he says, hesitantly reaching across to put his arm around her shoulders. “I hope you don’t have the same dream again.”

“But was it just a dream, or was it something else?” Laurie says. “It sounded different.” Meg shrugs.

“I dunno, but the Fog isn’t usually in my dreams like that. It was like a nightmare, but I felt like there was an actual danger in it. Like when you’re in a trial and you can feel the air prickling your skin, y’know? Like it’s trying to warn you to stay alert? Same vibe. My nightmares aren’t usually so, like… like everything else here. It felt like I was in some kind of fucked up trial I hadn’t seen before, and she talked about the Game like she knew what it was. I don’t know how it’s a ‘game’, none of us do, that’s just what it’s… like, um. It felt like she knew more than me, even though it was my dream. So I should know as much as anyone in my own dreams, right? I might just be overthinking it. It just felt so… real. Entity-real, I mean.” Meg shrugs again. “Sorry, I can’t think straight. I swear it makes sense in my head.”

Dwight is frowning, but he looks thoughtful. “Maybe it’s something to do with the new Killer,” he says. “I haven’t faced him yet, but Kate says he puts you to sleep and hurts you in a kind of dream world. I think Quentin knows him from before here but he won’t say anything about it to me and I don’t want to push.” He pushes his glasses up his nose in a familiar nervous motion, his fingers twitching.  “I think he’s just shy, but there might be… something else going on?”

“I’ll ask Kate to talk to him sometime, she’s better with people than I am,” Laurie says. “She finds it easier than we do, too.”

“Yeah, good call,” Meg says. “If this is some kind of new Entity trick then we need to know what the fuck is going on.”

“Maybe that’s why Quentin always looks so tired,” Dwight suggests. “If he knows this new Killer, and he kills you by making you dream. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like to sleep.”

“Fucked up if true,” Meg says wisely. Dwight tries and fails to hide a smile, which fades as Fog begins to swirl around his feet. “Aw, fuck,” Meg says, checking herself and finding that the Fog is circling her too, winding lazily up her legs.

“We’ll get through it,” Dwight says, determined, his arm moving from her shoulders so they can clasp their hands together. “We’ve got this.”

“I admire your optimism, bud,” Meg says, squeezing his hand in hers. Across the campfire, Ace gives them an easy shrug as the Fog begins to swallow him too, but Meg can’t see anyone else being summoned. Maybe it’s Jake or Claudette, and they’re just in the woods right now. She sticks her tongue out at Ace to make him grin, then closes her eyes and lets the Fog take her, Dwight’s hand melting into nothing in hers.

She opens her eyes a few moments later at the feel of warm, humid air on her skin, and drops into a crouch. Depending on who they’re facing, the Swamp is either a blessing or a curse. The Shape seems to be able to see straight through all of the reeds, so Meg sends up a quick prayer that they won’t be facing him. At least it’s not in the Game today; that would’ve messed with her mind way too much after her nightmare. Meg takes a deep breath, putting it out of her mind, and begins to creep along the edge of the arena, searching for clues as to the Killer and the locations of the gens.

There’s silence for a few long minutes, no sign of any Killer – must be the Shape, Meg thinks – until a cry of pain echoes in the distance. Definitely Claudette, from the sound of it, and no notes echoing through the swamp to indicate that the Shape has been stalking her, which seems unusual. Meg turns and squeaks, covering her mouth quickly as she nearly walks directly into one of the puppet-topped torture boxes that mark today’s match as one against the Pig. She shivers. The puppet’s sinister gaze feels like it follows her as she creeps away, hoping that wherever Claudette has led the Pig, it’s not nearby.

Ace is on the first gen she finds, and shoots her a wink as she crouches beside him to try and get as much done as possible before anyone’s put in a Reverse Bear Trap. Their gen lights up just as Claudette’s second scream echoes through the air, her silhouette falling to the ground across the arena. Meg curses, and sees Ace’s mouth twist with worry before they take off running in opposite directions. Best to split up before the Pig finishes with Claudette and comes looking for whoever finished the gen.

 Meg runs towards where Claudette has fallen, feeling the taste of bloody metal pulse through the air as the Pig puts a trap on her and hoping that maybe if she gets close enough she can get a save off before the Pig gets far enough away for Make Your Choice to become active. Meg’s heartbeat begins to get louder in her ears as she gets closer, crouching again behind a dilapidated boat and making a note of the gen nestled within it for later.

The Pig, carrying Claudette’s wriggling body on its shoulder, strides by, that distinctive red coat flapping behind it. Meg gets a glimpse of its begrimed mask as it passes, and she shrinks back against the boat. Claudette’s eyes meet hers through the metal of the trap.

The Pig throws Claudette up on the hook with ease borne of practise and sinks down into a crouch, Meg’s heartbeat abruptly quiet again as it slinks into stealth mode and creeps away through the reeds; Meg waits a few moments before creeping out to where Claudette is hanging, blood spreading steadily down her t-shirt from where the hook pierces her body.

“Heal here?” she whispers. Claudette shakes her head.

“I’ve got a medkit,” she manages, and Meg notices it half-hidden in the reeds where Claudette dropped it as she was hooked. Meg nods.

“I’ll take off running,” she says, and heaves Claudette off the hook. The hook slides out with a sickening scrape and Meg sprints away through the reeds before Claudette has even had time to pick up the medkit. If the Pig is nearby, hopefully it’ll follow her tracks instead of taking the time to hunt for Claudette.

It takes a moment for Meg to register and recognise the familiar sensation slipping down her spine: she’s Exposed. Meg drops immediately into a crouch and creeps to the dilapidated boat again, pressing herself against the side of it and hoping the Pig won’t take this opportunity for an easy hook. Maybe it’s chasing someone else by now.

There’s a sound like a scream, and before Meg can even think to run the Pig appears from behind a tree, knife outstretched and sprinting towards her like lightning. Meg yelps and, too late, tries to dodge, that long, simple blade slicing across her chest and leaving a wound that _burns._ She slides to the ground, hands pressing against her chest. The blood is so warm. The Pig stands over her; Meg doesn’t bother crawling, just shuffles until she’s sat semi-upright against the boat itself. If it’s going to put one of those traps on her, she wants it to look her in the fucking eyes first.

The Pig doesn’t move. Meg’s heartbeat is hammering so loud that she wonders for a second if you can have something as mundane as a heart attack in this place – would the Entity let you die purely from your body’s own weakness?

That gruesome mask tilts to the side. Up close, Meg can see the grime and blood caking it, the mottled silicone of the pig’s head flaking in places with age or use. There’s a glimmer of intelligence behind the black cut-outs of the eyes, but it’s far too dark to be able to see the eyes themselves. The long black hair trailing down across the Pig’s shoulders is matted and greasy, clumping together. Meg wonders if the Pig keeps better care of the hair underneath its mask. Does it even have hair?

This is the longest a Killer has left her on the ground without walking away or picking her up. The burning of the wound across her chest is getting worse with every second; it feels like it’s spreading, burning along her ribs and into her lungs. She knows she’ll die if the Pig keeps her here much longer.

“Fucking do something,” she spits, tasting blood. The Pig takes a step back, which… was the last thing Meg expected. It seems almost hesitant, and Meg can say for sure that the Pig has never been anything but ruthless before. The traps it puts on them all are evil, painful things, and even getting sacrificed is preferable to having your head ripped open by one of them. It leaves scars that take days to fade, a macabre grin stretching across both cheeks. Meg’s had to bear those scars more times than she can count. Something with a weapon that cruel has to savour what it does.

The Pig slides into a crouch and creeps forward until the mask is just inches away from Meg’s face. It stinks of rot and gore, and up close the stench is overwhelming, but Meg resists the urge to close her eyes and strain away from it. There’s no point, and fuck if she’d letting this thing have the upper hand any more than it already does.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she grates out. “Just hook me and get it over with!”

The front of her shirt is sticky and clinging to her body with blood now, and she’s feeling the lightheadedness she knows to associate with heavy blood loss. Claudette’s yellow silhouette is crouching behind the tree the Pig leapt out from, but she can’t do anything with the Pig this fucking close. Meg shakes her head, and watches Claudette creep away to work on a generator. The Pig reaches out one bloodstained hand and touches Meg’s cheek with unexpected gentleness. Meg flinches back and bares her teeth.

“What the fuck do you want?” she whispers. The Pig’s fingers are calloused and dirty against her cheek; she can feel blood transferred from its skin to hers in a warm, sticky stripe along her cheekbone. Her heart is thundering in her throat, and the burning in her lungs is making it hard to even take a breath. God, she just wants whatever this is to be fucking over.

“Meg?” says the Pig, muffled beneath the pig’s head mask, and Meg’s so shocked that for a moment she doesn’t even say anything. “Meg?” the Pig says again, questioning. “Meg?”

“How the fuck do… do you… know my name?” Meg forces out past the blood on her tongue. It’s getting harder and harder to concentrate past the dizziness and that goddamn _burning,_ but the Killer just addressed her by name, what the fuck? This has to be important somehow.

There’s a beat of stillness, and Meg gets the feeling that somehow the Pig is just as shocked as she is. It didn’t think it would actually have gotten that right.

A generator lights up across the map, two yellow silhouettes bolting left and right, and it seems to shake the Pig out of whatever was happening here. It turns and stands, Meg’s heart thundering again, and casts her a final look before it runs into the reeds towards the others.

“What the fuck…” Meg manages, then closes her eyes and waits. Either she’ll die or someone will come save her, and honestly, she doesn’t mind which right now. She needs to think about what just fucking happened, but right now she can’t even feel her fingers, the mud of the swamp soaking the bottom of her legs into numbness as well. It’s all too much.

A third generator lights up – Meg hears the noise of the bigger boat’s foghorn ring out across the reeds but doesn’t bother opening her eyes – and a few moments later she hears footsteps pounding towards her.

“Meg? Shit, god, I don’t even have a medkit-”

“Hey, Dwight,” Meg says drowsily. “Cl… Claudette’s got…”

“I’m here,” comes Claudette’s voice, reeds rustling as she presumably pushes through them. Meg slits one eye open and watches Claudette hand Dwight a roll of gauze, both their slightly blurry faces drawn with worry. Claudette’s managed to get the Reverse Bear Trap off, thank god.

“Hey,” she says. “’Sup.”

“Been better, been worse,” Claudette says, offering a smile as she pushes Meg’s shirt down her shoulders to get a better look at the wound. The cold air makes her shiver, contrasting with the heat of the blood.

“Yeesh,” Dwight says softly. “She really got you.”

“Aw, shit, she did?” Meg slurs. “I hadn’t… noticed…”

“Dwight, we need to get her healed up before the Pig comes back,” Claudette says, and Dwight sets his shoulders, a determined look in his eyes.

“Right.” Meg lets out a moan as Dwight presses the gauze against the wound, the burning intensifying for a moment.

“I’ve got some butterfly bandages,” Claudette says. “I think we’ll need them for this one.”

Meg drifts. A hand shaking her shoulder wakes her back up, and she peers blearily into Dwight’s concerned face. 

“Hey,” he says. “All better. Come on, we have to move. Claudette’s gone to find a generator but I’m gonna stay with you. I can take a hit if I need to.”

“Thanks,” Meg says, and grasps his offered hand to get herself standing again. “Some weird shit going on, man.” The lightheadedness is still there, but it’s manageable now; Meg doesn’t feel like she’s about to pass out, just like she could really do with a fucking nap. The wound stings, but the burning isn’t in her lungs anymore, and the iron on her tongue isn’t fresh. She takes a deep breath of the stagnant air.

“Isn’t it always?” Dwight jokes, still holding her hand. Meg isn’t sure if it’s for her benefit or his, but there’s something about Dwight that always feels safe and besides, she likes holding hands. She clutches his fingers.

“Some extra weird shit,” Meg says. “I’ll tell you when we get out, yeah?”

A fourth generator lights up across the arena, the siren of it blending with the shout of pain that immediately rings out. Dwight tugs Meg towards a generator that’s already half done, Ace crouched behind it with his hands deep in the mechanisms. While Meg was dealing with the aftermath of her Pig encounter, Ace has obviously had one of his own; there’s blood leaking down his neck from the trap locked around his head. He pulls one oil-stained hand from the gen to wave at them both. Dwight lets go of Meg to rush forward.

“Ace! Go look for one of the puzzle boxes, what are you _doing_ -”

“We’re all getting out of here,” Ace says, speech slightly garbled around the mouthpiece of the trap, shrugging him off and eyeing Meg up with concern. The Pig has knocked off his sunglasses to put the trap on, and his blue eyes are bright and sharp as he looks at her. “You alright? You were down for a long time, kid.”

Meg smiles weakly. “Keeping it sexy, you know how it is,” she says. “We’ll finish this off. Go get that thing off, old man.”

Ace shrugs, as if to say ‘if you insist’, and takes off running, stumbling a little over a raised tree root. Meg turns to Dwight.

“You haven’t been hit yet, right?” she asks, waiting for Dwight to shake his head. “Go cover him for me? I can finish this up, and I’d feel better knowing that you’re keeping lookout while he scratches his arms up to get that thing off.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to leave you alone…”

Meg put a hand on his shoulder, suddenly so grateful for his unwavering loyalty and friendship. “I’ll be fine, Dwight,” she says, in what she hopes is a reassuring tone. “Look after the old guy for me.”

As Dwight moves to follow Ace, another cry rings through the swamp, and Claudette’s silhouette burns through the reeds as she falls to the floor. Dwight pauses, glancing back at Meg. “It’s her second hook,” he whispers. “I have to get her.”

Meg takes a deep breath and shoves her hands into the generator, tapping a couple of wires together and watching with satisfaction as they spark, cogs grinding laboriously against each other. “Claudette first, then Ace?” Metal pulses through the air again and they both wince; two traps in one trial is just unlucky.

“Ace can handle himself,” Dwight decides. “Claudette needs me more.”

“See you on the other side,” Meg says, nodding determinedly at him before he darts towards where Claudette’s silhouette was last visible. The generator lets out a belch of smoke, but luckily doesn’t bang. Meg thanks whatever god might be watching for Feng’s technical knowledge, her fingers trembling. So close now, so close…

The gen lights up, the exit gates beeping their readiness, and the adrenaline pulsing through Meg’s veins at the promise of victory pushes her patched-up injuries completely out of her mind. She bolts towards the nearest exit door as Claudette’s scream echoes across the arena, hooked far away enough that Meg probably has time to open the gate before she backs Dwight up for the save.

Her hand closes around the lever of the gate and she pulls down with all her strength, holding it in place and watching the first light flicker on above the control panel. Dwight screams, too loud, and it trickles down Meg’s spine like iced water.

No One Escapes Death. Of course the Pig would have it, the sadistic bitch – Meg pushes away the memory of gentleness, of the Pig’s hand on her face – as though Make Your Choice doesn’t already punish them for trying to help each other. The second light flickers, a klaxon sounding. Meg glances over her shoulder just in time to see Dwight hooked far too close; she can see his legs kicking at the Pig as it steps back from the hook, not even bothering to crouch again. The Pig’s head turns towards Meg, and the instinct to run feels as though it’s taking up all the room in Meg’s chest, frantic and fluttering.

The third light comes on, that damned klaxon sounding again. Dwight hangs on the hook, his quiet sobs drifting towards her. The Pig just stands there, watching Meg. The gate opens.

There’s a moment of tense quiet. Meg’s heartbeat is so loud in her ears that she’s getting a headache with the force of it.

She takes a step towards the Pig.

“Hey, uh, Pig,” she calls, throat tight. “You don’t want a piece of this?” When the Pig doesn’t move, she takes another step forwards. “Come on, man, you’re gonna give me the silent treatment? Really? I thought we’d bonded.”

Dwight chokes on a laugh, then groans as it jostles the hook. Meg grimaces, but perseveres. “Listen, we all just want to get out of here. You let me go before. Could you…”

The Pig is already shaking its head. Meg frowns, heart still thudding but her fear somehow diminishing. A killer who’s actually communicating is way less scary than the usual remorseless machine. It feels like maybe she can negotiate, or something. God, this is dumb.

“Please? You- you know my name, right?” She points at Dwight. “His name is Dwight, he was a pizza delivery boy, he holds my hand when I’m hurt even though it slows him down because he cares more about his friends than himself. The dark-skinned girl, that’s Claudette, and she’s into plants, like weirdly into them, knows everything about every plant ever. She makes stuff to put on wounds that makes them heal quicker or hurt less, and she has a really nice smile. Ace-“

“Stop it,” the Pig says suddenly. Dwight gasps behind it at the sound, and Meg realises that she was the only one who knew the Pig even could speak before now. At least he can back her up when she tells the others.

“Why? Is it harder to kill us when you know we’re people too?”

“It doesn’t matter that you’re people,” the Pig snaps, and Meg realises abruptly that under the mask is a woman, her voice high-pitched with anger and somehow… familiar. “I’m not playing games here. You’re all meant to die.”

“Games…” Meg repeats, and suddenly it clicks. “Amanda?”

“Shut up!” the Pig says. Meg almost falls to the marshy ground in shock.

“That’s how you knew my name,” she says. “My dream was- that was _you?_ ”

“Get out, or I’ll kill you too, you stupid bitch!” The Pig lets out a sound somewhere between a squeal and a snarl. “I let you go because you tried to help me in the nightmare, but that was a one-time offer. You’re pissing me off now, so fuck off before I change my mind.”

“Amanda,” Meg starts, and then spots Claudette creeping out towards Dwight, her dark skin pale with nerves. Ace must’ve gotten her off the hook while Meg was distracted with the Pig. Meg licks her lips. She has to keep the Pig’s attention. “Amanda, why are you doing this? Who was John? Why was I in your nightmare?”

“Shut up!” Amanda shouts, and storms towards Meg, blade outstretched and ready. Claudette runs out and lifts Dwight from the hook, grabbing his hand and tugging him along behind her as she runs in the opposite direction. Meg thinks the other door is probably open by now; hopefully they’ll make it. Amanda’s head whips around to watch them go, and then she turns back to Meg, fury evident in her posture without even needing to see her face under the pig’s head.

“You tricked me,” she says darkly. “You- you bitch, acting like you actually-“ Amanda shakes her head, the Pig’s clumped locks smacking audibly against the mask. “John was wrong, none of you can be saved. Sometimes I forget, I start to think that maybe he was right, maybe he could’ve saved people, but we’re all just fucking broken and treacherous and none of us deserve to fucking live!”

Meg, feeling lost, manages to stutter out, “A-Amanda,” before the Pig screams and sprints forwards, covering the distance between them in a second and plunging her blade into Meg’s stomach, the momentum throwing them both to the ground, Amanda’s thighs bracketing hers as the blade sinks even deeper; Meg feels the skin break on the other side, blood soaking the ground below her and running down her sides in rivulets.

“Fucking _meat,_ ” the Pig hisses, the stench of the mask and the pain of her wound making Meg’s eyes tear up despite herself, warmth trickling into the hair above her ears. “Acting like a person, just fucking up whatever you can get your hands on-“

“I-I’m just…” Meg cuts herself off with a hoarse cry as the Pig pulls the blade out of her abdomen and stabs again, this time a little higher, angled under the ribcage. Meg howls.

“None of them ever deserved to live!” the Pig shouts fiercely. “He called me a murderer, but he taught me how to fucking do it, just called it something different – why should some live and others die, huh? What makes anyone better than anyone else? Escaping some bullshit game? It doesn’t fix anything! I was still broken-“ She digs the blade in further. “And so are you, _Meg_ , whatever you did to end up here. Trials won’t fix you, the Reverse Bear Traps won’t fix you, won’t redeem you, no matter how many times you escape, and it was fucking stupid of me to give you a chance.”

Meg coughs up blood; the Pig has obviously punctured a lung this time, warm copper bubbling up her throat and spurting briefly from her nose when she chokes on it and snorts. “P-please, Amanda, I don’t know wh…” She’s dying, without any doubt. Even if she doesn’t get hooked, she’s gonna bleed out in the cold air with the Pig’s mask and smell and weight the last thing she knows. Meg feels herself start to go limp, cold seeping into her extremities in contrast with the almost burning heat of the blood escaping her body, spilling over her skin. “What did I do wrong?” she manages to ask, and one shaking hand lifts to rest on the Pig’s where the blade is still buried in Meg’s flesh, smearing Meg’s blood over them both. “Th… they’re my friends. I had… to help them. I-I’m sorry. For tri… trick…”

Amanda leans in close, the disgusting snout of the mask pressing slightly against the tip of Meg’s nose. “It doesn’t fucking matter,” she says, but this time she sounds more sad than angry. “Word of advice, Meg? Don’t fuck with me again.” The blade slides out, Meg breathing out a whimper, and is sheathed within the Pig’s sleeve. The hand under Meg’s moves to cradle her face, blood slick against Meg’s cheek, and Amanda’s thumb wipes across the track left by tears. “I’ll hurt you again, and I’m sure this bullshit is hard enough without me on your ass. I’m…”

“Broken?” Meg whispers, remembering the word from earlier, and Amanda tilts her head, the pig ears of her mask quivering a little with the movement. “We’re all… fucked,” she says, swallowing a mouthful of blood. The swamp is starting to get hard to see, the pig’s head mask swimming out of focus. “Doesn’t mean… we’re broken. Shit can always g-get.” Meg swallows again, blood staining her teeth and spilling from her lips. “B-better.”

“Shit only ever gets worse,” Amanda says, bitter. “The sooner you learn that, the better.” She stands, Meg’s cheek left cold and sticky with drying blood, and turns away from the girl on the ground. “Sorry.”

Meg dies alone, listening to the Pig’s heartbeat fade into the distance as her world slips into blackness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meg deals with the aftermath of her trial with the Pig, and Feng has an interesting experience of her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> howdy lads! this is up to 13k words already on my laptop so i have faith in myself that i'll be able to keep going.... fingers crossed.... the usual, please leave kudos/comments etc, hmu on tumblr @ chained2012, etc. etc. mild tw for ocd-related self harm/gore imagery and alcoholism!

Meg wakes surrounded by her friends, a cluster of worried faces swimming into focus as she comes to. Claudette’s warm hands press against her cheeks with something slightly rough and damp, her locs brushing against Meg’s forehead, not tied back for once.

“Meg? Oh my God, Meg,” comes Dwight’s frantic voice, and she recognises his hand slipping into hers and squeezing. It’s trembling slightly. Claudette stops wiping and pulls back, and Meg realises she was trying to wipe the blood from her cheeks when her eyes focus on the blood-smeared rag in her hands. “Meg, you’re back, thank God.”

“Of course I’m back,” Meg rasps, her teasing tone ruined by the dryness of her throat. “Where else was I gonna go, numbnuts.”

“It took you a really long time to come back,” Claudette says softly. “We thought you’d bolt while the Pig was distracted, you were so close to the door, but when we got back here we realised you weren’t and we’d…” Meg realises there are tears in her dark eyes. “We’d just left you,” she finishes, scrubbing the back of a hand over her eyes. “Meg, I’m so, so sorry.”

“Claudette…” Meg reaches out clumsily with the hand that Dwight isn’t holding, flailing it around until Claudette takes it. “It wasn’t your fault. I was figuring something out, finding out the Pig’s deal. I played distraction so you guys could get out, and I don’t regret that. She took me by surprise when she saw you’d escaped and she was… she was mad, dude. One of us was always gonna die. It’s best that it was me.”

Another tear slides down Claudette’s cheek, but she nods, understanding. “Did… I know what I heard, and I know Dwight heard it too, but… did the Pig really talk to you? You guys were having an actual conversation?”

Meg lets go of the hands holding hers to shuffle herself upright, flashing back for a moment to doing the same against the boat in the trial. Her chest burns briefly with phantom pain and she rubs at it with the palm of her hand even though the wound has by now closed up into a slightly raised white scar. She lifts her miraculously repaired shirt to look at her stomach, heart twisting in her throat as she looks at the twisted scars marking where Amanda stabbed her. Those are still more raw, darker and tender, the flesh underneath aching with remembered trauma. Claudette immediately fishes out a tub of herbal paste and starts dabbing it on them as she waits for an answer.

“She… fuck.” Meg drags a hand down her face. “This is so surreal. Her name is Amanda. She’s just… she’s just a person under the mask. Like, maybe not anymore, I guess, but she was just a person once. We met in a dream.”

“A dream?” Ace asks, brows pulled together. His signature sunglasses are back on, perched a little askew to avoid resting on a tiny cut on the left of his nose. The Entity sometimes forgets to heal the small stuff, or maybe just doesn’t bother. “Was it a sexy dream?” He wiggles his eyebrows, and when Meg bursts out laughing he breaks into a relieved grin. Ace is always good for a cheer-up, even in the most dire situations, and he makes sure to use that talent.

“Not exactly,” Meg says. Dwight hands her a bowl of water, which she gratefully drinks. It washes away both the dryness and the lingering copper of blood behind her teeth. Jake, who has been sat silently behind Ace this whole time just observing, frowns.

“This sounds important,” he says. “We should try to tell everyone at once. So everyone knows, and you don’t have to talk about whatever just happened multiple times.”

“Nea, Feng, Tapp and Quentin are in a trial right now,” Dwight explains. “Laurie is having a nap with Kate, and she hasn’t been sleeping, so I didn’t know whether to wake them up.”

“Let them sleep,” Meg says, sighing as the paste Claudette rubbed into her scars starts to kick in, numbing the pain and relaxing her muscles. “I could do with a fucking nap myself, honestly.”

“Same here,” Dwight says, even though he looks wide awake with anxiety. “You wanna nap together?”

Meg knows that’s his way of offering her comfort and company, making her feel safe. She knocks their shoulders against each other. “Sounds good, pizza man,” she says. Claudette shifts.

“Same?” she offers, shyer with her affections, but just as welcome.

“I’ll keep watch while you kids have your catnap,” Ace says, fondness colouring his tone. “I don’t think I could sleep if I wanted to.” If she squints, Meg can still see the chafing at the corners of his mouth where the trap had rubbed against the sensitive skin, and the same on Claudette.

“Thanks dad,” Meg teases, the others echoing the sentiment.

“You young things need to be kind to me,” Ace says. “I’m the only weird uncle you’ve got in here. Who else is gonna teach you card counting if y’all hurt my feelings and I have to go brood in the woods like crow boy over here?”

“Hey,” Jake says mildly. “That’s crow man to you.”

“We’ll leave off, grandpa,” Meg says, grinning, and despite Ace’s pointed muttering he still fetches them one of the thin blankets they’ve scavenged from various arenas and brings them each a medkit to use as a pillow. If Meg cranes her neck she can see twin blonde heads across the fire with the same tucked underneath their long hair, close enough to each other that their noses are almost touching.

Meg falls asleep with Claudette’s breath warm and soothing against her neck, her locs brushing against the underside of Meg’s chin, and with Dwight pressed against her back, his arm draped over her waist under the blanket. It’s one of the safest feelings she’s had since she was dragged into this shitfest of a place, and while it doesn’t make the horror of the last trial fade, it certainly softens the edges.

\--

When Meg wakes up next, it’s because Quentin nearly trips over the three of them on his way past the campfire, his legs shaky with sleep deprivation as usual. He smiles apologetically at her when he sees her eyes open, tiptoeing the rest of the way to his goal, a thick winter jacket they all share between them. Quentin’s lack of sleep makes him more vulnerable to the cold, so he gets priority unless someone’s had a particularly gruelling trial. Meg yawns and stretches, carefully extricating herself from the Claudette-Dwight cuddle pile. Dwight makes a protesting noise, but falls back into deep sleep without trouble. Claudette just snuffles against the blanket. Meg feels warmth bloom in her chest at the sight of her friends, their faces smooth and unworried for once, sleeping peacefully.

The scars aren’t anywhere near healed, even with Claudette’s ointment, but they ache a little less, and Meg will take what she can get. Meg sits close to the campfire, warming her hands and chucking a stone on to heat up, fishing it out with a stick once it’s warmed a little and wrapping it in cloth to press against the supernaturally healed wounds. She lies on her back and sighs with pleasure as it soothes the twisted muscles. Laurie and Kate aren’t asleep anymore, but are still a little sleepy, leaning against a log and each other with heavy-lidded eyes. Laurie spots that Meg is awake and stands, brushing a quick kiss over Kate’s cheek – when the hell did that happen? – before she makes her way over to Meg.

“How you doing?” she asks, adjusting her glasses a little. “I hear that your dream was more important than any of us had figured.”

“Yeah,” Meg says, looking up at Laurie from where she’s lying on the ground, letting gravity press the stone into her scars for her. “So, you and Kate? How long has that been going on?”

Laurie blushes. “Maybe a week? It’s hard to figure anything out when we’re here, time isn’t exactly linear, but it’s been maybe 5 trials? She just… makes everything feel a little better, y’know? We’re surrounded by boogeymen all the time, trapped in this place, but when she kisses me it feels alright. I forget about the Shape, and the other killers, and all the terrible things they’ve done. It’s just us.”

“And she’s like, super pretty,” Meg points out, reaching out to poke Laurie teasingly in the leg.

“Oh, completely gorgeous,” Laurie agrees, a shy smile sneaking its way onto her face. “Those thighs, man…”

Meg laughs, moving the stone slightly to one side to press on the other scar. Laurie frowns.

“Did you get mori’d?”                    

“I’ll explain, don’t worry. Is everyone here?”

“Yeah, I think so. Jake’s somewhere in the woods, but he usually comes back if we call for him, and then it’s just a matter of waking those two up.”

Meg sighs. “Alright, time to explain, I guess.”

Laurie and Kate get everyone gathered together, Claudette making hot cups of tea for them all once she’s woken up enough to find the right herbs in her collection. There’s a serious atmosphere around the campfire that they all usually try to avoid, seeing as it’s their safe space from the bullshit of the trials, but it’s inevitable, Meg thinks. This is a pretty big deal.

She tells the story from the very beginning, from waking up in the dream to waking up after the trial, every detail she can remember. Some of the specifics are a little fuzzy, honestly – her memory has never been the best – but she remembers enough to bring the others completely up to speed.

“Do you think that’s how she got here? She was killed by this John guy, in the Game? You were, like, seeing her death?”

“I don’t know, Quentin,” Meg says apologetically. “Maybe? I guess? But I think it was on a loop, and she remembered me in the trial, trying to save her, so I don’t think it was actually when she died. More like I was in her nightmare.”

“Nightmare…” Quentin murmurs, his pale face almost grey even in the dancing light of the campfire. “I… I need to go,” he says hurriedly, and walks quickly off towards the trees, his hands shaking.

“I’ll go check on the poor thing,” Kate says, and scoops up his cup of tea to take with her. “Maybe I’ll get some info on the new killer for y’all while I’m at it. Looks like this is all interconnected somehow with him.”

“Tell him we hope he’s okay,” Claudette says, worried. Kate winks at her.

“Of course, darlin’,” she says, and then follows Quentin’s path to the trees, boots clinking gently with every step.

“So… they’re all just people? Or they were?” Jake murmurs thoughtfully.

“Maybe some of the others can be talked to, reasoned with as well?” Dwight says, also thoughtful. “If they’re all human, or they used to be, maybe that’s actually a possibility. The Pig – Amanda – certainly wasn’t friendly, but maybe we can try talking to some of the other killers.”

“She only listened to me because we’d met before, though,” Meg points out. “What if the other killers just ignore us? They’ve never stopped hooking us before, even when we’ve been begging them to.”

“It’s worth a try,” Feng says. “I’m sick of this place. If it goes wrong we are dead, so what? If it doesn’t, maybe we’ll have uh… what’s the word? Not a friend, but…”

“Ally?” Dwight suggests, and Feng clicks her fingers at him.

“Yes! Maybe we’ll have an ally. If they are not all monsters, maybe they will listen.”

“That’s a good point,” Dwight admits. “It can’t get much worse than it already is. Most of us are being sacrificed or killed every day. What more can they do to us?”

Meg thinks of the Pig’s blade deep in her chest, blood filling her mouth, and says quietly, “They can make it slower.” Claudette’s hand slips into hers, warm from the residual heat of the tea mug.

David and Tapp have been very quiet throughout this whole discussion. Meg glances at them and finds both their faces pulled into frowns. “What do you guys think?”

Tapp’s mouth twists. “You can’t trust killers,” he says. “I’ve seen ‘em my whole life, worked to stop them, and they don’t change. Not when they’ve been killing for so long. The first one gives them the scent, and that’s it. I don’t think this is sensible.”

David shrugs. “Might as well try, I reckon,” he says. “Fuckin’ already trapped in ‘ere with ‘em all the bloody time, what’s the ‘arm in tryin’ a different strategy.”

“Shit,” Jake says, and everyone realises almost simultaneously that fog is swirling around his feet. David looks down at his own feet and swears too.

“Bring it the fuck on,” he says, cracking his knuckles. “Feng, Jake, you’re up too. Ready to kick some killer ass?”

“You bet,” Feng says grimly; she’s always been a competitive one, right from the start, and Meg’s always relieved when they’re in a trial together. She’s not the most altruistic, but by God she gets through generators fast.

“Must be Kate or Quentin as our fourth,” Jake says. “See you guys in there.”

The fog climbs up their bodies in a matter of seconds, soon obscuring them completely, and when it clears David, Feng and Jake are gone. Meg feels a guilty relief that it’s not her this time, that she can have a moment to recover from the shit that went down with the Pig. Quentin comes hurrying out of the trees, two cracked mugs in his hands. It’s obviously Kate’s turn, this time.

Meg hopes they all get out alright.

\--

Feng sighs as darkness lightens into the grey walls of Lery’s Memorial Institute, sinking immediately into a crouch. She’s spawned right next to one of the exit gates, snow kissing her arms with cold lips as it falls, and she really hopes that this doesn’t mean they’re going against the Doctor. Of course, Killers don’t always hunt in their home maps, but he seems to really like this place. Feng hates the way his electricity hurts her mind, makes her intrusive thoughts even louder, builds up screams behind her teeth like her body isn’t under her control any more. The other Killers at least don’t fuck with your head.

The snow is a welcome sight, after several trials in the Rancid Abbatoir and Coldwind Farm. The blood caking her arms and hair and… well, everything has been driving her nuts for days, unable to wash it all off with the meagre water supply Claudette can collect from the tiny spring she found in the woods. As much as Feng wants, some days, to say fuck you to all the other survivors and just give herself as thorough a clean as she can manage under the circumstances, she knows she can’t. They need the water to drink and wash wounds, and she’s been selfish for too long.

The snow is cold, of course, but not as cold as it would be if it was real, which she’s thankful for as she scrubs it along her arms, ignoring the gooseflesh it causes. Cleaning her hair is the worst part, cold on her scalp and trickling down her neck, but feeling some of the grime slip out with the melting snow is worth it. Feng’s official OCD diagnosis had helped her get some meds and shit, but there’s none of that in the Entity’s realm, and she’s been struggling more and more with how unclean everything is, even the air itself stale and tainted. She feels bad that she doesn’t help the others off hooks a lot of the time, but the blood is so hard to wash off once it’s dry and when she looks at the hole the hook leaves in their chests her brain says things that she doesn’t want to think about. There’s no time to tap things in fours, or count her steps, or any of the things she used to do to calm herself when things got bad. Feng can’t go and get blackout drunk until she forgets that she even has these urges, these tormenting thoughts. She’s trapped in the Entity’s realm and in her own bullshit brain.

Her hair is cleaner, now, but what she wouldn’t give for a shower.  Shivering, Feng wraps her – marginally cleaner – arms around herself and ignores the texture of the grime and dried blood on her shirt against the bare skin. A scream echoes through the air, a brief orange silhouette flashing against her eyelids when she blinks. So it is the Doctor, then. Feng grits her teeth.

When she rounds the corner, she immediately spots a haphazard pyramid of bones and thin strips of flesh, a fire with no fuel crackling within it. Feng jogs forward to cleanse it – maybe this totem will stop her working on the gens – and taps four times against her thigh, again, again, again. The bones of the totems are always slightly slick, greasy, as though they haven’t quite dried out from whatever creature they’ve been ripped from, and the texture is so unpleasant, but if she stops mid-cleanse she’ll have to start over again.

“Breathe,” she whispers. “You can do this.” One last set of taps, both hands on both thighs this time, and she leans forwards and begins the cleansing.

\--

Of course it’s the fucking Doctor.

David hates this bastard more than any of the others, except maybe the Hag, because at least the others have the decency to fight you fair and square – ish. This prick has to fuck with your head to get you down, which as far as David is concerned, is a pretty pussy move. He can feel the scream rising in his throat, and takes off before it can rip free, the slight heartbeat he’d been hearing fading back into the eerie stillness of the Institute. There’s a bang as someone cleanses something, and David feels a thrill of victory. _Not so clever now, are ya, prick_ , he thinks to himself, finally finding a generator and crouching beside it to coax the old thing to life.

Somebody else screams – Jake, he thinks – and the sound of it startles David enough that he drops a wire, the gen short-circuiting with a deafening bang. “Fuck!”

The heartbeat starts up in his ears again, getting louder and louder as the Doctor comes towards the source of the commotion. There’s no point hiding from him; his static field bullshit will just make you scream for him anyway. David takes off running as the air starts sparking around him. The Doctor is here. Jake screams again, but when David glances over his shoulder, the wide eyes and manic grin of the Doctor are focused entirely on him. The scream builds and builds, and David sees the Doctor’s fist clench, and then he releases, electricity crackling lightning-quick across the floor, and the scream bursts out as the current makes his muscles seize up, David pushing through it to jump through a window. The Doctor giggles, high pitched and breathy.

“Fuck off, cunt!” David yells, taking a hard right and hoping that if he loops the guy enough, he might be able to shake him. He remembers, suddenly, Meg’s story with the Pig, but puts it out of mind. If he’s gonna try to make contact with any of these wankers, he’s sure as hell not starting with this crazy bastard.

Electricity surges across the floor again, but David manages to bank left and avoid it, just about. He’s not so lucky the second time; he’s caught right in the middle of it, his muscles locking up so hard he can’t even move for a second, another scream ripping its way from his throat so forcefully that his voice cracks. The Doctor’s giggle is so much closer now, but David just keeps stumbling forwards, throwing a pallet down just as the Doctor swings, his spiked rod catching David’s arm and ripping the skin. He and the Doc let out cries of pain at the same time, weapon and pallet connecting almost simultaneously, but David’s off and running before the Doctor has even recovered from the stun.

The wound feels electrified, like it always does when he gets hit by this prick, and when he takes a quick look at it he can see his muscles tensing and releasing in spasms, the red flesh angry and raw. Another scream tears itself out despite his best efforts, and he ducks behind a locker, head in his hands.

_Snap out of it, ya big idiot,_ he thinks to himself, focusing on slowing his breathing like he would before a fight. _You’ve brought down bigger pricks than ‘im before. Put ‘im in a London pub without all his fancy bullshit and we’ll see who’s the big man then._

Another ripple of electricity, and another scream. David swears and runs again, breathing a sigh of relief when a generator bursts to life across the arena, swiftly followed by another. The others have been doing work while the Doctor’s on him, so at least he’s managed to buy them some time. He runs around a corner straight into the Doctor’s arms, and he counts it as luck that the Doctor is just as startled as he is and misses the swing.

“Better luck next time, knobhead!” David crows, adrenaline making him laugh, and he manages to push his exhausted muscles into a little burst of speed as the Doctor swings for him again, missing by a whisper. David swings a pallet down just to buy time, but the Doctor doesn’t even bother breaking it, just runs around the other side without hesitation. David circles back around, still laughing. “That all you’ve got?” he shouts, taking off when the Doctor decides to finally break the pallet, another damned scream clawing its way out of his throat. It hurts like shit, this electricity bollocks, David’s head aching and sparking with it. The longer you’re around it the more it hurts, and he’s getting the fuckin’ hallucinations now, Doctors appearing round corners to watch him with wide, manic eyes. The real Doctor is still behind him, gaining rapidly, but David spots a pallet and runs towards it, waiting a moment for the Doc to come closer and then swinging it down with all his strength. The pallet disappears under his hands, vanishing into thin air, and David realises too late that it too was a hallucination, just a fucking trick, the Doctor’s weapon smashing into his skull a moment later.

The Doctor giggles. Everything feels fucking blurry, David’s limbs heavy and useless; he can’t even crawl, and he feels a stab of genuine fear. _Did this cunt just give me fucking brain damage?_

Another giggle, and the Doctor turns him over to look at his face, wide eyes studying David intently. David struggles to look back at him, vision out of focus, but it’s not like he’s anything worth looking at. The whites of his eyes are tinged red, probably from being pulled wide all the time, and his teeth are caked in fuck knows what. His skin is ashy and grey, cracking like old wallpaper, and the apparatus on his head sparks so brightly that it hurts to look at. The Doctor laughs one last time, scraping his weapon slowly along David’s face until he feels the skin split, and then picks him up, slinging him over his shoulder. Another generator lights up.

There’s blood in his eyes, but David laughs anyway at the sound of the generator siren. “They’re gettin’ out of here,” he slurs against the stained white of the Doctor’s coat. “Wasted all yer time with me, din’t’cha.”

The Doctor slams him up onto a hook with more force than David reckons is necessary; this time when he screams, it’s nothing to do with the electrics. No matter how many times you get hooked, it always burns like the first time. A few tears squeeze their way out of David’s eyes, clearing some of the blood so he can see a little; the Doctor stands in front of him, smacking his weapon into his gloved hand. There’s almost a smugness in his posture – _Finally got you._ David spits at him. It misses, but it’s the thought that counts.

The Doctor lunges forwards and brings down the spiked rod again, electricity crackling the length of it, and David screams as at least one of his ribs just snaps. The Doctor laughs, hitting again, and David can’t help but let out another yell, hoarser than the last, as there’s another crack. Blood runs warm down his abdomen, starting to soak his trouser leg, and he realises after a moment that he’s pissed himself as well, the pain and shock of the impacts making him lose control. The Doctor comes up close, his eyes intently focused on David’s face as he hangs, and laughs again, the tip of his weapon scraping against David’s pants like he wants David to know he knows what just happened.

A fourth generator pops, and the Doctor decides to stop camping him, fuckin’ finally. He runs off towards the generator that just came online, David watching two yellow silhouettes creep left and right, making their careful way towards him. He glances around for the third person and finds them stood upright doing… something. David squints. Why the fuck are they touching their head like that?

\-- 

Feng cleanses the totem and runs, keeping close to the walls and ducking through several rooms in a row, trying to make her tracks hard to follow. Two screams echo out in quick succession, far enough away that Feng isn’t too worried, and when she finds a generator she pushes them out of her mind to focus on the task at hand, quick fingers repairing like it’s second nature. Another scream rings out just as she finishes it, the gen lighting up with a screech, and a second gen whirs to life almost immediately after. Feng wipes the oil from the gen onto her shorts and tries not to focus on the sensation of it under her nails as she goes hunting for another gen to work on.

“Better luck next time, knobhead!” Feng hears distantly, and grins. David’s always good at giving killers the runaround. Footsteps come thundering past her and the grin slips away in an instant; Feng darts into one of the grimy cubicles and crouches at the very back of it, heart thudding in her ears. “That all you’ve got?” David shouts, mocking, but his footsteps fade as he leads the Doc away, the heartbeat quieting as the Doctor follows, until Feng can’t hear either of them anymore.

Something cold drips on her head and she flinches, reaching a hand up – if it’s cooled blood or something this is going to be terrible. Her hand comes away wet but unstained; Feng looks up, and sees the showerhead in the cubicle is dripping. Her heart stops in her chest. _Do these things… actually work?_

Feng reaches out and twists the handle attached to the pipe of the showerhead, her hand shaking a little. It lets out a ragged groan, the sound of old plumbing that hasn’t been used for decades, but then spits out a stream of cold, _clean_ water. Feng yelps – it really is fucking cold – but she could cry with happiness. This whole time, there’s been showers right fucking here, she can get clean, properly clean – no soap, but running water!

_You’re in a trial right now,_ a little voice reminds her. _Is this really the best time?_

It’s the only time, Feng thinks fiercely, and shucks her shirt over her head. David screams distantly, his silhouette falling to the ground, but Feng just tugs off her trainers and shorts, slinging the clothes over the side of the cubicle, out of the way of the water. Her pants, she leaves on – she can just take those off at the campfire to dry later – but she wriggles out of her sports bra without hesitating, then dunks herself underneath the freezing spray.

She yelps again. Fuck, that’s cold. David screams again as he gets hooked, the pink outline of the Doctor burning through the walls of the Institute as he stands close, bringing his weapon down on David again and again. None of them could help him right now anyway, Feng knows, so she just scrubs at her skin with her palms, watching weeks or months or years’ worth of caked on blood and grime swirl down the equally disgusting drain. As it flakes off, the scars underneath become visible, the open wounds she never let Claudette see; she’s always mentally struggled with greasy skin, greasy hair, and when she can’t shower she ends up picking at her skin, like that’ll somehow remove the contaminant. There are little bloody patches across her forearms, a stinging in her scalp as the cold water hits the hidden wounds there, but she’s finally getting clean. It doesn’t matter if it hurts, she’s _clean_.

Feng crouches to scrub at her thighs, her palms aching with the force she’s using. The others are creeping towards David, now that the Killer has left him alone; she doesn’t have much time before she needs to get back on the ball. Only one generator left. She’s shivering uncontrollably with the cold of the water. Dunking her head under the stream, Feng scratches at her scalp with blunt fingernails, combing through it until she can feel the hair is as clean as it’s going to get. The water hisses past her ears and into her mouth, drumming against the tiled floor.

“Fuck,” she whispers. It’s like a great weight has been lifted; she might still be trapped in hell, but at least she isn’t contaminated by it anymore. Feng stands, backing out of the stream, and wipes the water out of her eyes, blinking them open. She screams.

The Doctor is stood in the entrance to the shower cubicle, silent and unmoving, headgear sparking. He hasn’t got his static field on right now, just his weapon tap-tap-tapping against his hand, but his eyes are on her, his body blocking her escape.

Not that she could fucking escape anyway, she realises. She’s in her underwear and nothing else, soaked to the bone, trembling with cold. Shit, this really was a terrible idea. At least the Doctor is just looking at her face; he doesn’t even seem to care that she’s basically naked.

They stand at an impasse for a moment. Feng reaches blindly behind her and twists the shower handle, the water sputtering to a stop, then taps her hand against her collarbone anxiously, four four four. The Doctor’s eyes dart down to the movement. 

“If you’re going to hook me, can I put my clothes back on first?” she blurts out, immediately horrified. “This is embarrassing enough. I just wanted a shower, and there’s nowhere else I can get clean, and it-”

The Doctor takes a step back, and if Feng didn’t know better, she’d think he looks nervous. “You can hook me after, this is my own fault,” she says. “I’d rather you didn’t, but… just let me get dressed first?”

The Doctor shakes his head, and her heart sinks, but he just turns and jogs out of the room, leaving her alone there, heart thudding in her ears.

“Oh my God,” Feng whispers, all the tension leaving her in a rush. She almost collapses to the floor, but remembers how dirty it is at the last second and manages to keep herself upright. She grabs her bra and fumbles it on, the elasticated fabric sticking awkwardly to her wet skin, then puts her shorts and t-shirt back on, slipping her feet into her trainers.

The last generator comes online, the exit gates sounding, and Feng bolts towards the nearest one. She’s not pushing her luck with this. Her trainers chafe against the damp soles of her feet, and she’ll probably have blisters later, but that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

When she arrives at the gate, David is already there, looking like shit as he holds down the lever. Someone’s tried to clumsily patch him up, but Feng can see two nasty wounds just below his pecs, and he’s bleeding through a patch of gauze on the arm holding the lever. “Fuck, he really got you,” Feng says. “Do you want me to get the gate?”

David shakes his head. “Just keep a lookout, love,” he says. “I need ya to take a hit if he comes at us.”

Feng nods and shifts into position, trying not to think about the Doctor’s blank surprise in the face of her stupid decision. The air crackles with electricity and she whispers, “He’s coming,” just as the second light flickers on, the exit gate so close to being open now. The Doctor rounds the corner, laughing maniacally, and she almost misses it but he hesitates when he sees her. Feng gives him an awkward wave.

Whatever happened in the shower hasn’t changed the game, though; after that brief hesitation he comes running for them, and Feng blocks a blow meant for David with her forearm, crying out when the bone snaps. The gate slides open, _finally_ , and she and David both run through, David dodging one last hit before he hits the barrier that stops the Killers following them. Feng runs through it a second later, the Doctor’s swing clacking off the black spines, and pauses, looking back. The Doctor stares after David, then swivels those wide open eyes to focus on her. Feng swallows, cradling her broken arm against her chest, ignoring the waves of nausea cresting in her throat at the pain.

“Thanks,” she says, feeling stupid. “For the shower. I… needed it. That was nice of you.”

The Doctor swings at the barrier again, frustrated. Feng realises he probably won’t get a single kill this round, and shrugs. “GG,” she says. “Better luck next time.” _Git gud,_ she doesn’t quite have the guts to say, with her broken arm not yet healed, a reminder of the violence this creature inflicts on her and her fellow survivors, but she thinks it, stifling a smile, as she turns and runs back towards the distant glow of the campfire.

\--

Feng doesn't tell the others about what happened, though she's pretty sure Kate, David and Jake know something went down. When David was hooked he had Kindred on, showing their positions to each other, and her movements couldn't be passed off as something she'd do in the course of a normal trial. Jake shoots her a suspicious look but doesn't say anything, and Kate seems completely willing to ignore that there was anything off. They all got out, and that's what generally matters to her. 

"Lookin' pretty clean, Feng," David says conversationally, sitting beside her next to the campfire. Claudette has already seen to his rapidly-healing wounds, his abdomen tightly bound while his ribs straighten themselves out and knit themselves back in place. Broken bones are always a bitch; they still heal, but they ache, and broken ribs are second only to a broken leg if you get pulled into a trial before they're fully healed. Feng's arm is in a makeshift sling made of Meg's running hoodie. It still burns, but Feng thinks that's probably more the memory of the break than the actual lingering damage. Claudette has wrapped bandages around the little self-inflicted wounds on her forearms, too, which was sweet of her. 

"You should try it," Feng snipes back. She's still trying to process what happened; she's definitely not ready to talk about it, especially with him. An image flashes through her mind of David, bleeding out through wounds all over his body. Feng screws her eyes shut and taps her fingers on her collarbone, four four four. Thigh, four four four, until she can push the image back into the darker recesses of her mind. 

David's eyebrows raise a little. "Alright, I'll leave ya be," he says, putting his hands up placatingly. "I know some shit went on, though. I dunno what you were doin' while I was on the hook but it weren't the normal trial stuff. If yer know somethin' new you should tell someone, love. Don't matter who. Don't have to be me." 

"Mind your business," Feng says, tap-tap-tapping. In her mind's eye, she gouges David's eyes out with her fingernails, rivulets of blood and ocular fluid spurting down his face and clumping under her fingernails. The more stressed she gets the harder it is to push the images down, but she clenches her fists and tries her hardest to stop imagining gore on her hands. David casts her fists a glance. 

"You old enough to drink?" 

Feng's head snaps up. "Yes," she says emphatically. "Yes. Why?" 

"I found a stash o' somethin' on Coldwind Farm," David stage-whispers. "Moonshine shit. If you wanna forget whatever's botherin' ya." 

Feng's missed the taste of it, the feel of it sliding hot down her throat, the way it dulls her mind and makes the intrusive images blurrier, less upsetting. She's missed it so much it's been like a physical discomfort, deep in her belly and in her brain, aching like an overworked muscle. She remembers the long nights in bars drowning her sorrows, picking fights she couldn't win just to get knocked around, feel something that wasn't just failure, wasn't just her spiralling brain. She remembers waking up in places she didn't know with people she didn't recognise, with less clothes than she'd have preferred and aches between her thighs that made her want to cry. 

She was addicted, she knows. She was an alcoholic. As her career went down the drain she came to rely on it more and more, until it felt like it controlled her life. Feng takes a deep, steadying breath. 

"No, thank you." Feng gives David a tense smile. "I have.... had problems with it before. Alcohol." 

David makes an 'ahh' sound of understanding. "Sorry," he offers. "Won't ask again." 

"You didn't know," Feng replies, and they sit in silence after that, waiting together for their broken bones to reset. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> david is SO fun to write! he lets me use all my english swear words none of the others would ever use >:3c


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claudette experiences her first Nightmare, and some of the survivors have a very close encounter with the Shape.

Claudette wakes up, and it's pitch black. 

For a bizarre moment she thinks the campfire has somehow gone out, throwing them all into darkness. She reaches out, suddenly scared to make a noise, and her hand brushes against what feels like concrete instead of the dirt of the survivors' gathering place. She takes a deep, calming breath. 

Could this be a new map? Maybe the Entity took her for a trial when she was sleeping. It's happened before, but usually they're all so tightly-wound that the change in atmosphere wakes them up when the Fog starts to circle their bodies, or one of the others shakes them awake. 

Okay, Claudette, breathe. 5 senses. Claudette's done enough research on treatments for anxiety that she could probably be the Fog's unofficial therapist at this point, and the 5 senses exercise has always helped her stay calm when she's on the verge of panicking. 

Sight. Nothing, which is scary, but manageable. 

Touch. Claudette skitters her fingers across the floor, coming up against a concrete wall after a few moments. A wider sweep doesn't reveal anything of significance other than a few indents and gouges. 

Taste. The air is cold and stale, vaguely mildewy on her tongue. It's unpleasant, to say the least. 

Smell. Mould or mildew or whatever is growing in here is the most noticeable smell, but underneath there's... well, urine, Claudette thinks, maybe something worse. Like something lived in here once, but wasn't cared for much. 

Sound. Claudette strains to hear anything, but it's just dark, silent nothingness. 

"Hello?" she calls nervously, palms clammy. There's no reply, but she hears a noise like something dragging along the ground. Claudette shuffles towards it. "Hello? Is there someone there?" Something clacks against the floor, and she realises suddenly that the old flashlight she'd fallen asleep with attached to her belt is here in the dream as well. Her fingers fumble for it in the dark, and she clicks the switch. For a moment the light is blinding, painful and overwhelming after the impenetrable blackness, but she blinks a few times and waits for her eyes to adjust. 

It looks like some kind of basement. Concrete, like she'd guessed, walls blank as she shines the light on them. There's a bucket in one corner, stained with things she doesn't want to think about, and a pile of blankets in the corner opposite. Other than that, it's empty. 

Well, at least there's blankets. Claudette stands, stooping a little so her head doesn't brush the low ceiling, and walks over to the pile. She reaches out to take one, and the pile shifts with a frightened cry. Claudette yelps, tripping backwards and almost dropping the flashlight, landing painfully on her coccyx. 

"W-who's there?" she shouts. When nothing happens, she remembers the fear in the mystery person's high voice, and takes a deep breath. "Who are you?" she asks, more calmly, soothing. "I won't hurt you. I just want to see who you are. Please?" 

There's a pause, and then a rustle, and then a head pokes out from the blanket pile. It's a child, she realises. Now that his head is out of the blankets, Claudette can hear the rasping, wet quality to his breathing.

"I'm sorry if I scared you," she says, trying for an encouraging smile. "You're not in trouble. My name's Claudette, what's yours?" 

The blankets shift again, letting Claudette see the child more clearly, and she stifles a gasp. His eyes are a little lopsided, nose dragged down at one side, and his mouth is twisted in a way that looks profoundly uncomfortable. His skin looks almost like it's melted down his face, and he has patches of wiry hair rather than a full head of it. She obviously doesn't stifle it well enough; the child wriggles back into the blanket pile, eyes staring balefully at her. 

"Sorry, sweetheart," she says. "You just surprised me. I didn't expect you to be so handsome!" 

The boy laughs, rasping and laboured, and tucks the blanket under his chin. 

"What's your name?" Claudette asks again. The boy hesitates. 

"Max?" he says, sounding almost uncertain. It's a little garbled, spit catching in his throat, but Claudette can understand him well enough. She smiles. 

"Nice to meet you, Max. Do you know where we are?"

“Home,” Max says. “Quiet.”

Claudette takes that as an instruction; she shuffles closer so they can talk more quietly. “Home? Is this where you live?” Max nods. Something twists in her chest. “Do you ever get out of here, sweetheart?” Max shakes his head, and Claudette has to take a moment to breathe through her anger. Someone is neglecting and abusing this child, and she can guess why.

“Do you know how to get out?”

Max points upwards, and Claudette sees a trapdoor set in the ceiling, heavy wooden boards barring the only exit. Max is too small to have a hope of breaking through them, and Claudette thinks that probably she won’t be able to either, and she doesn’t want to draw any attention to them before she has a plan. Whoever’s living above them may be there right now. Claudette takes a deep breath. There’s not much she can do here, practically, but she grew up with two younger siblings. She knows how to distract an upset or frightened child.

“Hey, Max, do you wanna see something cool?”

Max nods, looking curious despite himself. He doesn’t venture from the blankets, so Claudette moves closer instead, sitting next to him but with enough distance between them that hopefully he won’t be spooked. She reaches into the pouch she keeps on her belt and pulls out a dandelion, slightly crumpled but still whole and recognisable. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a dandelion,” she explains when Max shakes his head. “Also called ‘taraxacum officinale’. It’s a plant. Most people consider it a weed, which is another word for a plant that isn’t useful or pretty, but it’s actually got several different uses. Here, do you want to touch it?”

Max reaches a hand out of the blankets, misshapen fingers closing gently around the stem of the plant. He makes a rough, pleased noise in his throat.

“Dandelion greens – that’s the leaves on the plant, you see? – are very good for you! They have lots of vitamins that help you grow big and strong. You can make dandelion tea or dandelion wine, dandelion coffee or even jam with the flowers. Isn’t that cool?”

Max nods, but then his mouth twists further into a frown, and he crushes the dandelion in his fist, squeezing it until the white sap inside the stem starts to ooze out. He opens his fist again and looks at where it’s stained his palm yellow. Claudette’s heart is in her throat.

“Why did you do that, Max?” she asks.

“Hurt,” Max says. “I hurt.”

“You’re in pain?”

“Hurting,” Max says, and suddenly his arm shoots out of the blankets and latches onto Claudette’s forearm, grip surprisingly strong. The rough, melted texture of his skin is thrown into sharp relief in the direct beam of the flashlight, but Claudette manages not to flinch at the roughness and abruptness of his skin against hers. He’s still a child, after all. Max squeezes, harder than a child should be able to.

“Me, I hurt,” he says. “Hurt Momma, by being born. By being broken. Freak. Ugly. I hurt…”

“You hurt them? Your parents?” Claudette shakes her head, lips tight, eyes burning with blooming tears. “Listen to me, Max. You don’t hurt anyone by existing. It wasn’t wrong for you to be born. Your purpose is not to hurt. That’s not what anyone is made to do. Do you understand? You’re not a monster for looking the way you do, even if the people who were meant to love and cherish you treat you like you are.” Claudette extracts her arm from his grip, and slides her hand into his. “Your parents should have loved you instead of hurting you. I’m sorry.”

Max shakes his head, tears in his mismatched eyes. “I just hurt,” he says, and seems to sit up straight, but Claudette realises with horror that he’s actually growing, his twisted body emerging more and more from the pile of dirty blankets, his ragged shirt splitting as he bursts through the seams. “Made to hurt,” Max says, but his voice is lower, more of a wet rasp than before, every breath sounding like a growl as the air claws its way in and out of his lungs. Claudette looks at his face again as he speaks and feels herself pale with fright, the blood draining from her face.

“Oh God,” she whispers as the Hillbilly stands, shaking off the blankets, his head scraping against the low concrete ceiling. Claudette glances down at his hands and falls backwards in terror as she realises that his hammer and chainsaw are in his hands, streaked with dried blood. “Max, please, please,” she starts, but is cut off by the chainsaw as he revs it, stirring the stale air around them both. This close it’s deafening, reverberating off the enclosed walls of the basement and rattling in her ears. “Max!” she shouts, and for a moment the Hillbilly – Max – whatever, whoever he is, looks down at her, his heavy, wet breathing the only sound other than the muted purr of the chainsaw.

“You don’t have to do this!” Claudette pleads, hand creeping across the floor to the flashlight, trying to be subtle. “Max, nobody was made to be cruel! You can make a choice, you can choose to be kind! Please, Max,” and she holds out a trembling hand. “Max. You don’t have to do this.”

Max looks at her, something sad in his twisted face. “Made for this,” he says. “Born for this.”

He raises the chainsaw, the engine roaring, and Claudette barely rolls out of the way in time, the chainsaw crashing into the floor by her hip with an awful metallic scream, stuttering to a stop at the bite of chain against concrete. Claudette yelps and grabs the flashlight, palms sweaty as she aims it at his face, and he lets out a terrible, gargling cry of pain but doesn’t pause – light never stops him, she remembers suddenly, terror rearing up in her stomach and throat – as he revs the chainsaw again, this time predicting Claudette’s movements and slamming the rotating chain into her leg just below the knee, the teeth chewing through flesh and bone with ease. The pain is blinding, overwhelming, engulfing; Claudette’s scream seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, her nerves on fire, the stump of her leg so, so hot, everything on fire-

The Hillbilly doesn’t take the opportunity to finish her like she thought he would. Through the film of tears making it hard to see anything, pain and fear entwined like invasive vines, Claudette sees him drop the chainsaw, his hunched back slouching even further. She looks down and sees the terrible, splintered bone and ragged flesh of her calf, thrown inches away from her knee. She tries, dazed, to move her foot, and finds herself overcome again when it doesn’t move, just her knee twitching and sending stabbing pains up her thigh with the movement, fresh tears spilling over.

Claudette tries to say something, anything, but all that comes out is an anguished cry. The Hillbilly drops to his knees and reaches out, and Claudette flinches where she’s lying, even that sending her thigh into spasms, but his hand reaches out and tenderly brushes her hip. Claudette twists her head, shuffling it to see, and realises that she didn’t close the pouch containing her foraged flowers and herbs, crumpled petals spilling to the concrete floor. As she watches, Max’s hand reaches out and picks up something from the small pile. A dandelion, she realises as he lifts it, staring with those dark eyes at it and then at her.

“Gentle,” Claudette whispers. Max’s other hand reaches out and touches her uninjured knee, his mouth opening.

Claudette wakes up in the bright light of the campfire to screams.

\--

“Claudette! Claudette! Oh my God, please wake up, please wa- Claudette!”

There’s a cacophony of frightened voices crying her name, so many that it’s too much to focus on at first. Claudette opens her eyes and blinks the fuzziness from her vision, finding it harder than she normally does when she wakes up.

“Guys?” she murmurs, licking her dry lips. “What…”

“Claudette, your fucking leg!” Meg says, urgent and afraid, her warm hand on Claudette’s strangely cold cheek. Claudette swivels her eyes to the direction Meg’s voice is coming from and sees her face is wet with tears.

“My…” All of a sudden it hits; the basement, the Hillbilly, the chainsaw biting into and then _through_ her leg. “Oh God, it was real,” she croaks.

“What was real? What happened?” That’s Dwight’s voice, she thinks.

“You had a Nightmare,” Meg realises, horrified. “You had a Nightmare like mine with the Pig, didn’t you? Oh God, I knew I would’ve died-”

“A nightmare?” Claudette hears Quentin whisper, and then blackness claims her.

\--

“She’s out again, what- what do we do?” Dwight says, panicking. “Quentin, do you have a medkit, anything, does anyone-”

“I’ve got one,” Nea says abruptly, pushing through the survivors clustered around their unconscious friend and ripping it open, bandages spilling onto the hard ground. Jake, silent and tearstained, grabs a square of gauze and presses it to the ripped muscle at the end of Claudette’s leg. At the end of her stump, Meg thinks, sick to her stomach. Jake’s bitten his lip so hard that there’s blood starting to leak down his chin. Even Ace hasn’t said a word, ashy and shocked.

“My Nightmare,” Meg forces out, avoiding looking at Claudette’s leg even as she starts to bandage it, shaking hands recoiling when she brushes hot wetness, “at the end, I didn’t say, but when she lunged for me, with the screwdriver, I felt like, really strongly that if she’d got me with it it would’ve counted. It would’ve hurt me for real, like any other wound. Claudette… if she…”

“She must have had a Nightmare with one of the chainsaw killers,” Nea says. “Nothing else could do this kind of damage.”

“How the fuck can a nightmare ‘urt you fer real?” David butts in. He’s always reverted to anger first when he’s confused and frightened, and they all know he hates feeling helpless. He’s taken enough hits for them all to know he’s a man of action, even without his tales of legendary bar fights.

 Kate, who hasn’t said anything yet, her eyes wet but the tears not spilling over, says quietly, “Quentin.” When he looks at her, everyone else torn between the two (except Jake, who has taken the bandage from Meg’s unsteady hands and is completely focused on patching Claudette up as best he can), she continues gently, “This is to do with him, isn’t it?”

“Who?” Meg blurts out. Quentin’s hands are clenched into fists against his knees, his eyes red and raw not only with lack of sleep but with crying. He takes a deep breath, gaze wandering over to where Claudette lies, her breathing shallow, her blood soaking the ground beneath her.

“Him,” he says, barely above a whisper. “Freddy. Freddy Kreuger.”

\--

 “Freddy Who-ger?” Nea says.

“The Nightmare,” Kate says. “The new Killer. That’s his real name.”

“You know him?” Dwight asks Quentin, pushing his glasses up his nose in a familiar nervous tic. There’s blood on his fingers. Claudette’s blood, Meg thinks, and scrubs her own bloody hands against her leggings, suddenly hyperaware of it drying sticky against her skin.

“He did this to me,” Quentin says, and lifts his shirt to reveal 3 long scars across his chest. “He… he hurt me, and my friends, and Nancy. He’s an evil man, or maybe a demon. I don’t know what he is anymore. He used to only be able to hurt us in our sleep, and I guess that’s still true, but he has to work within the Entity’s rules now. Or I… I thought he did. I’m not so sure now.” Quentin wipes the back of his hand across his eyes. “This is all my fault!” he cries, pressing his face into his hands, his mouth stretched wide in a helpless sob. “If I had just killed him properly, not used the fire, made sure he was really dead, he wouldn’t be here, doing this, and Claudette wouldn’t be hurt!”

“It’s nothing to do with you!” Nea shouts, making them all jump. “You remember what Meg said? The Pig – Amanda – she probably died before she came here. Even if you’d killed this booger guy it wouldn’t have stopped shit. It’s not your fault, okay?”

Quentin, seeming startled, nods. Meg agrees with the message, if not maybe the delivery, and she can see some of the others nodding too.

 “What if she dies?” Jake says, speaking for the first time since Claudette’s leg just fucking cleaved in two while she slept. His voice is hoarse and choked. Meg remembers that he and Claudette have been here longest out of everyone here, even longer than she has. When Meg first found the campfire, it had been just Claudette and Jake huddled there, sat close to find any human comfort they could in this hell. Jake has always loved Claudette more openly than he’s ever loved any of the others.

“She’ll come back, right?” Dwight says. “We always come back.”

“But that’s in trials,” Nea says slowly, realising Jake’s point. “What if we don’t heal outside of that. Remember when Dwight tripped and broke his nose, and it didn’t reset until after his next trial?”

“But it wouldn’t let her die, surely,” Meg says. She strokes Claudette’s clammy cheek. “It needs us, for the trials.”

“Not all of us,” Nea murmurs. “Only four at a time.”

“Shut up,” Meg snaps, nausea rising in her throat. “She’ll be fine, she… she has to be. I… I can’t… we can’t lose her. Not Claudette. Not any of us. Not like this.” She presses her palm against her eye until bright spots dance behind her eyelids. “She doesn’t deserve this,” she says thickly, and abruptly can’t stand it, standing and taking off. Everyone watches her disappear into the forest, the sound of trainers against dirt fading. Meg’s ADHD fills her with restless energy at the best of times, let alone in this kind of stress, and she feels like something’s about to snap. After a few minutes of running, breath dragging through her lungs, it does, her resolve disappearing like it was never there, and she falls to the ground, scraping her knees and bowing her head.

The tears don’t come, and neither does sound; instead, Meg’s mouth opens in a silent scream, just pressure and anguish and grief all wrapped up behind her teeth, spilling out without form. Her nails dig into her forearms, harder and harder until she feels the skin start to give, fluid leaking out under her fingertips. It helps, clears her mind for a moment, and she takes a deep, gasping breath inwards, fighting off the panic attack she can feel building.

A hand lands on her back, big and gentle. She looks up and meets Jake’s dark eyes. They’re still bright with tears. “She wouldn’t want you to hurt alone,” he says simply, and sits beside her. Her head falls onto his shoulder, too heavy for her to hold up, and she lets herself cry, feeling his jacket becoming damp. Dampness soaks her hair a little as he rests his head atop hers, his body quivering, but she doesn’t say anything. She knows Jake wouldn’t want anyone to see him cry.

\--

Meg falls asleep with her head against Jake’s shoulder, exhausted with grief, and wakes up with Fog circling them both. She shakes Jake awake, urgent hands on his shoulders. “Jake! Jake, it’s a trial, you have to wake up!”

He does, bleary, looking down at his lap where the Fog is slowly climbing his thighs. “Claudette,” he says, stricken, and Meg realises that if she’s in the trial with them there’ll be nothing they can do to save her. She can’t survive a trial right now.

“Come on, maybe we can make it back before it takes us,” Meg suggests, pulling him up; they take off together at full speed back the way they came, twigs and leaves crunching and crackling underneath their pounding feet. The glow of the campfire comes into view as the Fog swirls around their chests, the familiar dizziness starting to make it harder to run, Jake stumbling. Meg pulls ahead, forcing her muscles into a burst of speed, and spots Claudette’s unmoving form almost completely wreathed in Fog, Nea crouched beside her with her hands on Claudette’s cheeks. Meg glances around the campfire before the Fog obscures her vision and sees that David is their fourth, throwing a piece of fabric into the fire. The Fog claims him first, cloaking him and then disappearing completely, taking him with it, and then the world goes grey and Meg closes her eyes.

She opens them with grass brushing her calves, and drops into a crouch. The asylum today, it seems. “Claudette?” she hisses, nervous to be too loud but desperate to find her friend. Maybe if they hide her, they can come back for her at the end of the trial so she doesn’t have to go through the additional pain of being torn apart and put back together.

Meg spots a generator and slinks over to it, trying to remember what Nea taught her about moving quickly but stealthily. She shoves her hands deep into it and finds a loose cog, shifting it into place by feel alone. The generator makes a choking, grinding noise and starts to click.

Meg’s almost done when she has the distinct feeling of being watched. She trusts her instincts and whirls around, desperately scanning the crumbling stone walls for a killer. She looks past him once before alarm pulses in her chest and she turns back, finally spotting the white mask she already knew she would find. The Shape. Michael Myers. Meg throws her middle finger up and then ducks out of sight, sneaking around the tree in the direction she hopes he won’t choose to take. There’s silence, just the heavy atmosphere of the asylum pressing down around her, until she hears the distinctive sound of breathing, muffled by his mask. Meg peeks around the tree and sees him kick the generator, booted foot slamming into it with ease and sending up sparks before he scans the area. Meg ducks back out of sight, her heart beating in her ears, and presses herself between the two trees. Maybe if she stays still enough he’ll walk right past her.

He does, his blank face looking for her footsteps, assuming she’s run, and Meg breathes out a silent sigh of relief as he moves away, towards the flickering lights that mark another generator. She stands, ready to go back to her gen and undo his damage, and he pauses, head tilted to the side. Meg freezes, holding her breath, as his head turns, those black eyes fixing on her and just staring. Meg bolts, sprinting to a window and vaulting it without hesitation, her neat footwork making no noise as she throws herself through, and keeps going, nerves amping up when she hears the telltale chime of the Evil Within ‘levelling up’, as Feng calls it. At least she’ll hear him coming now.

Meg runs into the chapel and up the stairs, passing David on a generator and then doubling back to finish it with him when she realises that Myers isn’t after her anymore. David nods at her.

“Used an offerin’ to start the trial with someone, but it were me and Jake, not me and Claudette,” he whispers. “Jake’s gone off ter try ‘nd find ‘er, get ‘er out of harm’s way.”

“Good thinking,” she whispers back, barely catching a loose wire before it would’ve sparked and blown up in her face. “I tried to look for her but couldn’t see any sign.”

The generator lights up and David says, “Stay alert, love,” before he loudly vaults the window and drops down to the grass outside. It’s not his fault; the man’s built like a tank. Meg darts across and down, landing lightly but with a wince, and takes off in the opposite direction.

She spots Myers across the arena, walking slowly and with purpose, and for a moment thinks he must have spotted David or Jake, but she sees the two of them creeping along a wall close to her a few moments later and her heart drops to her stomach.

_Claudette. He’s found Claudette._

Meg starts running, pushing her muscles as much as she possibly can. “HEY!” she yells, waving her arms. “YOU MASKED BASTARD! OVER HERE!” Myers glances at her, but doesn’t bother giving her his full attention. He’s stopped now, staring at something on the ground. Meg redoubles her efforts. He’s so fucking far away; if he tiers up again, Claudette is as good as dead, and it’s so fucking unfair! She’s completely helpless, can’t run or hide or defend herself, she’s probably not even conscious. David and Jake’s attention she has got, however, and they realise what’s happening just as she does. Jake starts running, dropping his toolbox, before David can grab his arm and hold him back.

“Jake!” echoes across the arena before David curses, picking up the toolbox and running to the nearest gen. Meg’s more grateful than she thought she’d be; he’s at least focused on the practical needs of the trial.

She’s almost there when Myers tiers up, those chimes swelling and filling the air around them. Meg stops, almost tripping with the speed change, and sees Jake stop as well, their fear overwhelming their need to help. “Leave her alone, creep!” Meg shouts. Myers’ knife is raised, ready to tear them to the ground, but he doesn’t move; Meg walks closer, finally seeing Claudette lying motionless on the ground in front of him. His head tilts.

“Come get someone your own size!” Meg shouts, desperate. It’s a stupid thing to say, and Jake gives her an incredulous look for it – Myers is at least two foot taller than both of them – but Claudette’s only chance is to take his attention from her onto one of the others. David’s generator bursts to life, but even that doesn’t dissuade Myers from whatever game he’s playing. Meg chances it and comes even closer. All he’d have to do now is step over Claudette’s prone form and lunge and she would be dead, but still he doesn’t move.

“Michael?” she says, mouth dry. He looks at her, knife still raised, but doesn’t move. “Michael, what are you doing?”

_What are_ you _doing?_ screams a little voice in the back of her mind, Laurie’s pale face behind her eyelids, but she thinks of Amanda and thinks, _what’s the harm in trying?_

Myers crouches and Meg mirrors him, ignoring Jake’s wide eyes in her peripheral. This is different to how he usually behaves – he’s unstoppable, ruthless, uncaring, unchanging. This… this is new.

He presses the tip of the blade against Claudette’s neck and Meg barely holds back a cry of protest. Nothing she does will be able to stop him, if he chooses to kill either of them. If she spooks him, whatever spell is over this moment might break, and then they’d be dead for sure. The sharp metal draws a bead of blood as it breaks Claudette’s dark skin. She’s still unconscious, blood loss and trauma knocking her out, and the lack of reaction seems to pique Myers’ interest further. He draws the knife down her throat to her clavicle, leaving a dark red line, and Meg can tell even through the mask that he’s watching her carefully for any response. None comes. Claudette doesn’t even flinch. Meg thinks she’s probably more dead than alive at this point.

Myers looks up at Meg, blank. He looks back down at Claudette and then up at her again, a silent question. _What’s happening?_

“She got hurt outside the trial,” Meg explains, voice shaking. “There’ve been nightmares, but not normal ones. These ones… they hurt you for real.”

“What are you doing?” Jake hisses, creeping up behind her. A generator rings out in the distance, and Meg thanks God for David, working diligently as they navigate whatever the fuck this is.

“I don’t know!” Meg hisses back, then continues. “She’s… well, she’s mostly dead already, I think. She won’t react like we normally do. This isn’t normal. Nothing you do will mean anything.”

Myers pauses, considering her words, and then plunges the knife into Claudette’s stomach. Meg and Jake scream in unison; Jake lunges forwards and bowls Myers over, catching him by surprise, and Meg sees the knife clatter to the floor beside them as Jake wrestles the killer and bites at his wrist, drawing blood and making the fingers spasm open, fury giving him a ferocity Meg would never have expected. It’s hopeless, Myers already gaining the upper hand with a series of hard kicks, hand scrabbling sideways for the knife, but Meg darts forwards and snatches it up before he can grasp it. It’s surprisingly solid in her hand, heavy and thrumming with dark energy – she flings it away into the darkness, watching silver get swallowed up by black. Jake cries out behind her and she whirls back around to find Myers on top of him, one powerful hand around Jake’s throat to pin him to the ground. Jake looks so small like that, so helpless, and Meg runs instinctively forwards to do something, anything; she ends up grabbing a handful of the mask’s hair and just ripping it off. It comes off far more easily than she’d expected, as though it doesn’t even matter, but Myers makes a noise like a frightened animal and scuttles backwards, hands pressed flat against his face.

For what could have been seconds or minutes, nobody moves, Meg frozen in place, Jake gasping for breath on the damp ground, Claudette maybe dead, Myers covering his face. Meg holds onto the mask in her hand like a lifeline. “Michael?” she says again, but he just shakes his head. There’s something almost childlike in it. If he hadn’t killed them all so many times before, Meg could almost feel sorry for him. “Michael, I’m sorry for taking your mask. I can’t watch my friends get murdered again. I’m not damaging it, I promise. Just… keeping hold of it for now. I’ll give it back.”

Myers stretches one hand out, the other still on his face, long blonde hair covering what it can’t. Meg sees briefly a resemblance to Laurie as she catches a glimpse of one blue eye. “I can’t give it back,” she says. “Not yet. Why is this so important to you? You can’t kill without the mask on? It’s just plastic.” _And it stinks,_ she doesn’t say. It looks old up close, dirty and starting to rot through in places. Usually there’s no time to study it; Myers is one killer you don’t ever want to play with. If he can see you, you’re feeding his power. “Jake?”

Jake, who still hasn’t moved, tears his face away from Myers to look at her. “Yeah?” he rasps.

“Get Claudette out of here before he…” Before he what? Meg doesn’t understand what’s happening here. Jake just nods and creeps forwards. Watching Myers carefully, he slides his arms underneath Claudette’s and begins gently dragging her away. Myers’ hand lifts, clenched into a fist, but Meg thinks he’d forgotten he doesn’t have his knife. He opens the fist and looks at his fingers as though they don’t belong to him. Jake, now farther away, picks Claudette up bridal style and starts to stumble away in the direction of the third lit generator as it bursts into life.

Meg thinks of Amanda screaming in her face, blade stabbing underneath her ribs, blood filling her mouth. _I’m sorry_ , before she walked away and left Meg to bleed out alone in the swamp. Just a human being.

“I… I’m sure you know it already, but my name is Meg,” she says. “I used to run track in college. Had a scholarship. Can you tell me anything about you? Why… why are you here?”

Michael’s hands, still over his face, twitch. He lowers them, slowly, and peers at her through the curtain of lank hair. Meg smiles encouragingly.

“What’s behind the mask?” she asks softly, and immediately realises it was the wrong thing to say. Myers lets out an inhuman noise and springs forwards, Meg barely managing to avoid his grasping hands, his heavy bulk knocking her down and winding her. Meg gasps and wriggles away from him, the toes of her sneakers digging into the dirt as she propels herself into a sprint. His breaths are louder without the mask on, the smell of his unwashed jumpsuit filling her nostrils as he manages to grab her ankle with one big hand and tug her to the ground again, her face smacking into it before she can put her hands out. There’s a crack, and Meg feels blood begin to trickle from her nose. She scrabbles at the dirt in a desperate attempt to free herself, but he just pulls her towards him, flipping her over and pressing a hand to her chest to stop her getting away. It hurts, fierce pressure against her sternum. Meg gasps for air, Myers sliding his hand up to her throat and using his other to pin down her right hand, but he realises a moment too late that it’s not the hand with the mask. Meg, using the last of her strength, throws the mask away, both of them watching it land limply on a nearby pile of rubble. Myers will have to choose between it and her, now, and Meg is pretty sure she knows which he’ll choose. He lifts the hand pinning her wrist, eyes focused on the mask, and Meg reaches up lightning-quick and pushes his greasy hair to the sides, exposing his face.

It’s… remarkably ordinary. His eyes are startlingly blue, wide and somehow empty, glazed over. He has a strong nose and jawline, pale stubble covering his chin and cheeks, and his lips look… soft, full. Meg looks back up at his eyes, which are still blank, and says, “I see you.”

It’s smug, a little fuck you to someone she’ll probably never have any power over again. If his mask is so important to him, it’s probably his worst case scenario to be seen as she’s seeing him, nothing to hide behind, just them truly seeing each other for the first time. It almost makes her feel as though they’re equals, despite everything else about the situation. She has the power, in this moment.

The moment ends. Myers grabs her by the face, covering her eyes, and smashes her head against the ground. Her brain rattles in her skull, her mouth opening involuntarily in a gasp, her hands pushing ineffectively at his chest as he rams her head back again, and again, and again. Meg feels the back of her skull crunch into pieces, her arms going weak and useless, flopping to the sides. A fourth generator screams its awakening and she laughs. “Fuck you,” she slurs, feeling dizzy, and feels Myers’ hand leave her face. She blinks her eyes open and sees nothing, just darkness, and flails her hand to her face. “Oh God,” she whispers, waving it in front of her eyes and still seeing nothing. The back of her head hurts so much, the little pieces of bone nestling themselves gruesomely further into her brain, but Meg’s panic gives way suddenly to acceptance. She lets her hand fall to her chest, just feeling the beat of her heart, letting it reassure her she’s alive.

_This will heal,_ she reminds herself. _This is all just temporary._

She can’t hear Myers breathing anymore. Her heartbeat is fast but not deafening; he’s left her. Meg wonders for a moment if he’s decided to let her go, but as she does, she hears the heartbeat kick up again, hammering in her ears so loudly that she almost misses the sound of heavy footsteps underneath it.

“What’s up, Mikey boy,” she says, grinning despite herself. He’s less scary when she can’t see him; nothing feels quite as real. “Come back to finish what you started?”

There’s silence, just blood rushing in her ears, and she gets the feeling that she’s being watched. Meg rolls her blind eyes.

“I can’t see you, asshole,” she says, “so you might as well just do whatever you’re gonna do and get on with it. Your creepy staring schtick doesn’t mean shit to me.”

Myers comes closer, heat radiating off him. Meg thinks he’s crouched over her – probably looking at her face, the curious shit he is, always looking for reactions and responses. Meg sticks her tongue out.

Something cuts into her stomach like, well, a knife through flesh, plunging deep, and Meg screams. His knife, he went to find his knife, of course – first the mask, and then the knife. The Shape back in place.

The knife lodges familiarly underneath her ribs; he’s killed her before, and always in the same way, watching her face as she cries out, impaled on his blade. Meg can’t help the noises that escape her throat. Having experienced this before doesn’t make it any less agonising, feeling her organs tear and her blood soak warmth into her shirt. The feeling of being watched is even stronger, and Meg scowls through the pain.

“Fuck you,” she spits again. “Fuck you, coward. Hiding behind that fucking mask, that knife. I get why the Entity called you the Shape now – you’re just an empty shell pretending at being human. You’re pathetic!”

The knife lodges impossibly deeper, Meg’s hands grabbing instinctively at the handle despite the futility of it. “Hit a nerve, did I?” she taunts, and spits blood at him when she feels it welling up in the back of her throat. She hopes it hit him right in that dumb ugly mask.

Meg dies, her snarl fading into slackness, with the Shape crouched over her like something feral.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact did u know that damage to the occipital lobes can cause partial blindness? wonder what would happen if a giant dude in a mask just smashed it right to pieces... also i'm a rz halloween 2007 michael myers stan so everything i write of him is through that filter! jic anything seems ooc for og michael, i've never actually seen his movies LMAO
> 
> i'm not putting it as a relationship tag but jake is 100% a he/him lesbian in gay love with claudette and i accidentally got myself into them as a pairing while writing this so :pensive: watch this space? 
> 
> please leave a comment if you're enjoying so far, or if there's someone specific you guys want more of! thank u for reading <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The survivors talk about their future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi guys!! just wanted to say THANK YOU to everyone who has commented, it means so much that people are enjoying what I'm writing! and if you like this fic, check out my other dbd fics - I published one recently about Freddy getting the snot beaten out of him based on a tumblr post, so if that sounds up your alley then please give it a read and a comment/kudos!

Claudette wakes with a gasp. There are arms underneath her bent knees and her back, cradling her to someone’s chest; she feels the warmth of thighs underneath her and realises that she’s in someone’s lap, being held there. “Wh… what’s going on?” she asks. Her throat feels dry. She swallows, but it doesn’t help. Her eyes blink open, hazy as though she’s been asleep for a long time, and gradually manages to focus on Jake’s face above her. It must be him holding her. Claudette smiles.

“Hey, sleepy,” Jake says, stroking a thumb across her cheek.

Claudette stretches, then regrets it when Jake lowers her to sit on the ground so she has more room to do so. The dirt is cold and hard compared to the warmth of him. “What… what happened?” Claudette looks around and recognises the darkness of the forest, an exit gate a few metres away blocked by the usual black spines of the Entity. Michael Myers is stood on the other side of the barrier, watching. Claudette can see blood on his knife. Jake follows her gaze and flips him off.

“You had the Nightmare with the Hillbilly, and he cut your leg off,” Jake says. “We woke you up, but you passed back out and didn’t wake up again. You were bleeding out. Then we got summoned for a trial, Meg and David and me and you, and…” Jake casts another look at Myers, scowling. “He stabbed you, and I think he’s killed Meg. We wanted to get you out of there, so Meg told me to take you and go. She pulled his mask off and it’s like it switched him off or something. He just let me carry you away. I haven’t seen her since, though – David got out with us, but he’s gone back to the campfire to tell everyone that you’re healing up. You really scared us all.”

Myers finally gets tired of watching and disappears back into the arena. Claudette and Jake watch as Fog circles the exit gate. After a moment Claudette looks down at her leg, the thin jeans completely damage-free, and rolls the material up her calves. One leg is unscarred; the other has a ragged, twisting line of thick scar tissue circling just under her knee. Claudette grazes her fingers over it.

“It still hurts,” she says. “And my stomach. You said he stabbed me?”

Jake nods. “Here,” he says, pressing a hand gently against her abdomen. Claudette lifts her shirt a little and looks at the barely closed pucker of flesh just above her bellybutton. That’ll take a while to heal.

“He also cut down your neck, but that was more shallow,” Jake says. “He wanted to see if you’d react, I think.”

“Did I?”” Claudette asks, feeling down her neck and finding a thin raised line running from chin to clavicle. She swallows.

“I don’t think you could’ve woken up even if you’d wanted to,” Jake says. “You… were basically dying, Claudette. I guess it’s lucky we had a trial, because our attempts at medical care weren’t helping much at all.”

“Don’t tell me you were worried about little old me,” Claudette jokes, pretending her hands aren’t trembling trying to process it all. Jake takes hold of them in both of his, his expression deadly serious.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life,” he says. “Not even when I first got here and the Hillbilly roared out of nowhere and slammed his chainsaw in my back and I thought I was dying for real. I thought we were going to lose you, Claudette.”

“Jake,” Claudette starts softly, startled, but Jake shakes his head.

“I don’t get attached to people,” he says. “It’s not my way. I’m not good at having feelings, or talking to people, or being around them. I wasn’t before I lived alone, and that probably didn’t help. I like the others, sure, but I don’t think I would have felt the same if one of them had been in the same position. You know, you’re the only person here I’ve told about my whole gender situation. I haven’t cared for and trusted someone like I do you for… as long as I can remember, actually. I think I might love you.”

He sounds almost confused, and it’s so him that Claudette can’t help but smile. Jake won’t look up at her, even with his hands on hers.

“I don’t expect anything from you,” he continues. “I just thought I should tell you. Nobody has ever understood me like you do before, and whether it’s as a friend or something else, I appreciate you. In case anything like this happens again, I don’t… I don’t want to have not been honest.”

“Who knew there was a big softie underneath that gruff exterior?” Claudette teases. Jake stifles a smile. “I want to start by saying that me accepting you as a nonbinary lesbian isn’t a big deal. It would’ve been silly of me to do anything else just because you use different pronouns than me. And I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out already, I thought I was being super obvious, but I’ve been into you from pretty much the moment I saw you. The first time I was on a killer’s shoulder – the Trapper, I think? – and I heard a hook snap clean off, his grunt of frustration, and I saw you running in the opposite direction, I thought ‘damn, that’s kinda sexy’. Which was weird at the time, because I thought at first you were a guy, but makes sense now. I’ve always liked butch women.”

“Didn’t he still hook you, though?” Jake says, quirking a smile. Claudette shrugs.

“It’s the thought that counts,” she says, testing her leg. She makes it halfway upright, Jake’s hand on her elbow, before it gives out and she tumbles back down. Jake manages to catch her before she hits the ground too hard, but even the lessened impact still knocks the breath from her lungs.

“I’ll carry you back to the campfire,” Jake says. “It’s going to take you time to get strength back in your leg; you can practise when we’re back there, but let’s get you something to drink and some proper rest first.”

“My knight in shining armour?” Claudette asks, blush deepening. Jake looks down at himself with a considering expression.

“Knight in ratty hiking gear, more like,” he says. Claudette laughs.

“I’ll take it,” she says simply, gesturing to him to pick her up. He does, as careful with her as he is with the delicate wires in the generators.

“Comfy?”

Claudette nods, resting her cheek against his chest. She can feel the slight curve of his breasts underneath the padded coat, his heartbeat steady and comforting. She winds her arms around his neck for a little extra security and watches him press a kiss to the inside crease of her elbow. She reaches up and kisses the underside of his chin, the highest she can stretch, and smiles against his lips when he tilts his head down to kiss her properly.

“Who needs armour anyway,” she murmurs against his lips, feeling his quiet laugh reverberate through their bodies.

\--

 When they arrive back at camp, Claudette’s arm around Jake’s shoulder – he’d carried her as far as he could, but had conceded when he stumbled over a rock and almost dropped her – Meg is lying on her back next to the campfire, spread-eagled. Claudette peers over at her.

“Is she… okay?”

“Claudette!” Quentin exclaims, scrambling up and running across the clearing to embrace her. “Thank God, we were all so worried!”

“So I’ve heard,” Claudette says, smiling. Jake rolls his eyes. The others start clustering around her, voices rolling over each other in an excited crescendo until Meg’s cuts through the noise.

“Hey, Claudette’s back! How is she?”

“Come see for yourself, lazybones,” Claudette calls, and Meg laughs.

“Jeez, no rest for the wicked – hey David, come help me up?”

“Sure thing,” David says without hesitation, breaking away from the crowd. Claudette frowns.

“I thought Myers killed you? Has it… is it worse than normal?”

“He went a bit OTT this time, Claud,” Meg says. Claudette limps away from Jake, concern written across both their faces, and pushes her way through the other survivors until she’s by the campfire. David’s holding Meg’s hand, which is kinda sweet, but Meg doesn’t do anything when Claudette comes into view, and her heart sinks.

“What did he do? Oh my God, Meg, what did he do?”

“It’s okay! I’m fine, I’m okay, he just… he hit my head against the ground a bunch and it fucked up my eyes. I can kinda see patches of light and dark now, so it _is_ getting better, just a pain in the ass for now. How’s your leg? Is it back?”

“It’s back,” Claudette tells her, voice thick with tears. “Oh Meg… Jake said you distracted Myers while he got me out of there.”

“Don’t you dare beat yourself up about this,” Meg says fiercely, also sounding suspiciously choked up. “I’d do it again, and I know you would’ve done the same. Now get your ass over here, I missed you.”

“She cried,” Feng says, and receives a slap on the arm from Ace. “What?”

“Leave a lady some dignity,” he says, watching as Claudette throws herself clumsily into Meg’s open arms, the two girls clinging to each other and laughing through their tears. Jake stands where Claudette left him, his mouth tilted up in one corner. Feng snorts.

“We have all seen each other die,” she says, crossing her arms. “I don’t think we have much dignity left.”

\--

“Yeah, I think I really pissed him off,” Meg says later, a mug of dandelion tea in her hands. There’s a distinct thread of pride woven through her voice. Laurie raises her hand in a toast; she’s not drinking anything, but the gesture is clear. Meg’s sight still isn’t very good but she can make out blurry shapes if she squints, and she grins.

“Serves ‘im right for bein’ a freaky cunt,” David proclaims. He’s drinking tea, but Claudette saw him slip something in it from a bottle tucked into a hollow in the log he’s sat on. She lets it slide.

“So,” Dwight says, thoughtful. “We’ve had the Pig and the Hillbilly so far. In the Nightmares, I mean. Should we keep trying to get through to the Pig-”

“Amanda,” Meg corrects. “I think using names is probably our best bet if we want them to listen to us.”

Dwight nods in acknowledgement. “Through to Amanda, or do we think she’s a lost cause?”

“I hate to put all the responsibility on you, sweets, but you’re the one who had the most contact with her,” Kate says, laying a gentle hand on Meg’s bare forearm. “What do you think?”

Meg’s mouth twists. “I don’t know,” she says eventually. “She obviously hesitated when she saw me, and I think she was going to let me go before she realised that you guys had got Dwight off the hook. She got so angry about that, dude. So honestly I don’t know if we can talk to her in the course of a trial because us helping each other and doing distractions will piss her off. If…” Meg sighs. “If I have another Nightmare with her, then maybe I can try to get through to her?”

“That’s a lot for you to do by yourself though,” Dwight says. “Maybe we should try a few times at least before we discount her?”

“I didn’t know the Pig when I was alive but I knew her mentor,” Tapp says grimly. “I’m not going into detail, but he killed multiple people in ways that make the Reverse Bear Traps look like a walk in the park. He never felt any guilt for what he did, as far as we could tell. He thought he was on some kind of sick mission to help people, so she’s probably as deluded as he is. If you’re going to try to deliberately make contact, I’m out.”

“You think she’s evil?”

Tapp scratches his neck. “If there’s such a thing as ‘evil’, real evil, then Jigsaw was it. The things he did to people… it kept me up at night. She’s his protégé. To follow a man like that you have to be seriously unhinged.”

“She seemed pretty messed up,” Meg admits. “I mean, she’s here and she kills people and rips their heads open and stuff, so you’ve gotta be fucked to do stuff like that. But we don’t know the full story. We never bothered to think about who the killers were before they were here. That maybe they were just human once upon a time. Maybe they don’t have a choice, same as us.”

“There’s always a choice,” Tapp argues. “Nothing is inevitable, nobody makes our choices for us. She could have chosen to stay away from Jigsaw, she could choose not to use those blasted traps, and she could _choose_ not to kill.”

“If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to kill someone, is it your fault or theirs?” Meg fires back. Tapp huffs out a frustrated breath.

“Yours, obviously,” he says. “If you value your own life higher than that other person’s, then you’ve made the choice to kill them. You could have chosen to let them live.”

“Screw that,” Feng butts in. “The human instinct to survive is stronger than any moral code. If someone held a gun to your head, you would have no choice. It is everyone’s basic need to live. It does not matter the situation. What would you really do to stay alive? Anything.”

Tapp starts to argue, but Nea cuts in before he can. “Look, I’ve done shit I’m not proud of,” she says. “I haven’t killed anyone or whatever, but I’ve done serious damage, stolen shit, I… and I did all of that just to impress my guys. People do stupid, horrible shit for the stupidest reasons, let alone in this place. Who knows what the Entity does to them to make them obey? If I had metal shoved in my back like the Trapper does, and killing people who I _knew_ would come back would stop any more pain? I’d do it. We all would.”

“Speak for yourself,” murmurs Quentin, looking sickly pale. “I would never hurt anyone here on purpose. We’re innocent. We don’t know that they are. Freddy certainly isn’t a good person – we don’t know that the others aren’t all just evil too.”

“And Michael,” Laurie says. “He killed my friends. He killed everyone I _loved_. Nobody made him do that. He was killing people before the Entity took him, and he wasn’t going to stop.”

“This is all hypothetical right now,” Dwight says, holding his hands out in a peacekeeping gesture. “We don’t know anything for sure except that Freddy and Michael can’t be reached out to. The other killers might not have been killers before they came here. Nea’s right – the Trapper couldn’t have lived that way as a normal person. That must have happened to him when the Entity took him, and it seems likely that it was either a punishment or a motivator.”

“Or both,” Claudette offers, and Dwight nods at her.

“Exactly!”

“In the Nightmare, Max was disfigured, but not to the extent he is here,” Claudette adds. “His skin was all stretched and melted-looking, and I think he had trouble breathing, but when he stood up and turned into the Hillbilly his limbs got all twisted and his shoulders, y’know.” She lifts one shoulder up and lowers the other, dipping her head in an approximation of the Hillbilly’s lopsided posture. “Maybe the Entity keeps him in pain so he does what it says. He talked like a child even when he grew into the Hillbilly. Maybe he doesn’t know anything except that basement and, well… here.”

That’s a sobering thought, for certain. Claudette can’t imagine having known nothing but darkness and blood. The others look just as affected; even Tapp seems uneasy with the concept, as much as he tries to hide it.

“Okay,” Dwight says, taking a deep breath. “Freddy and Michael are a no-go. Amanda is a maybe. I’m guessing that Claudette, you want to try to make contact with the H- Max?” Claudette nods, resolve settling in her chest. “Any other killers that you guys think might be sympathetic?”

“The Huntress,” Kate says. “I saw her crying once before the Entity took me.”

“Crying?”

“I was the last one alive, but she caught me before I found the hatch,” Kate explains. “She downed me with a hatchet, and I knew I was done for, so I just lay there ‘n’ waited for her to slap me on a hook. She got to me and just kinda… looked down at me for a moment, and she crouched down and just stroked my hair with one hand, still singing that lullaby, but a little slower. I…” She looks embarrassed now. “I started singin’ it back to her, and she looked almost happy about it. She let out this little cry and reached into her shirt like she was going to get something, but then I saw her cock her head like she was listening to something, and instead she stroked my hair again, then picked me up and just threw me on the nearest hook. I screamed, obviously, and then the Entity came slamming down, and just before it speared me I saw tears running down her face from under the mask.” Kate puts her face in her hands for a moment, and when she lifts it again her eyes are shiny. “I don’t think she wants this life,” she says.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Meg asks, aghast, and Claudette can’t help but agree with her. This is _huge_.

“I didn’t know if it mattered,” Kate says, rubbing the heel of her hand against one eye. “Wouldn’t’a been any point gettin’ everybody all excited only for it to have been a one off, or a trick or somethin’. I’ve never seen any of the others cryin’. Never seen them anythin’ but angry.”

“So, the Huntress,” Dwight says, before anyone has a chance to get properly annoyed about Kate keeping a secret from them all. “I think maybe the Nurse. There’s got to be a reason she’s called that, right?”

“She might not even be human under that pillowcase,” Ace says. “We’ve never seen her face or anythin’. She might be something else altogether.”

“She’s human _oid_ , at least,” Claudette says. “The others mostly seem human, so it’s probably a safe assumption that either she is or she was at some point.”

“Not sure ‘bout the Wraith, either,” David says. “Nothin’ human in that face.”

“He’s one that’s worth reaching out to though, I think,” Nea says. “He just watches us sometimes. I don’t think he knows we can hear him breathing. And one time I was running for the hatch and he kept ringing his bell, over and over, and I thought it was a taunt or something but when I found it he was stood by a nearby tree, just ringing. I think he was trying to lead me to it or something, but I dunno for sure. It’s just a feeling.”

“I don’t want to go within 20 feet of the Clown,” Claudette says, “but I’ll try any of the others.”

“Yeah, he’s gross af,” Meg says, wrinkling her nose. Claudette sees Laurie mouth ‘af?’ to herself, looking mystified. “I second that one.”

“The Doctor?”

“Prick,” David says without hesitating. “I reckon ‘e gets off on this shite.”

“The Hag?”

“She literally rips your liver out and _eats_ it,” Adam says, speaking up for the first time. “That doesn’t seem like a promising individual to pursue.”

“That’s fair,” Dwight says. “The Cannibal is called the Cannibal, so I think it’s sensible to leave him well enough alone as well. I don’t fancy becoming one of his masks. Who’s left?”

“The Spirit,” Adam says. “I don’t know if it’s wise to try to talk to her. There are a lot of spirits in Japanese lore, and I wouldn’t want to mess with any of the vengeful ones.”

“She cries,” Claudette says, thinking of the first time that sobbing face had cut her down, tears splattering ice-cold against her face as the Spirit bent over to pick her up. “There’s a lot of pain there. Maybe she could use a friendly interaction.”

Adam shakes his head. “I don’t think you’ll have much luck there, but I won’t try to stop you.”

“There’s that masked kid, what was it – the Legion?”

“We’ve only seen him a couple of times,” Dwight says thoughtfully. “I don’t think we have enough information to know what kind of killer he is yet. Maybe wait another few trials, see what he does?”

“He looks the most human of all of them,” Meg says. “Just some scrawny dude in a mask. I don’t know if that’s promising or more worrying, that he’s just a guy. Y’know?”

“He might not just be a guy,” Jake says quietly. “We haven’t seen everything he can do yet. Myers just looks like a guy at first.”

“So the Clown, Freddy, Michael and the Doctor are lost causes-”

“And the Hag,” Ace adds. Dwight nods.

“Right! Yeah. So we’re going to try with the Huntress, the Wraith, the Pig, the Hillbilly, the Nurse…”

“Maybe the Spirit, apparently,” Adam says reluctantly. “And the Legion, once we know him better.”

“Are you sure about this?” Jake asks quietly, and Claudette realises that he’s made his way over to her without her even noticing. She links their hands together, feeling Jake stiffen but not pull away.  “The Hillbilly nearly killed you for real. You want to go after that monster?”

“I don’t think he knows he has any other choice,” Claudette murmurs back. “He seemed to think that he was born for this. He said he hurt his parents by being born ugly, and all he does is hurt. I felt like I was starting to get through to him; he dropped the chainsaw and was about to say something, but I woke up before I could hear it. He didn’t kill me when he had me at his mercy. I have to hope that maybe we can change things. If we don’t have hope, then what’s the point of everything?”

Jake gives her a long, steady look. “Okay,” he says finally, and Claudette feels the corners of her eyes crinkle in a smile. Jake looks embarrassed at the positive attention. “I trust you.”

“We need to set up some ground rules though,” Dwight says, continuing the group conversation. “When we sleep around the campfire, we have to make sure somebody is watching over us to wake us up if we get wounded or anything. Otherwise… we might not wake up in time. It was lucky that Claudette’s leg was so noticeable; a stab to the gut or lung might not be something we see as quickly unless we’re watching for it. We don’t want to be too late.” There are a few nods of agreement.

“I don’t want to be a killjoy, but there’s no way I’m going along with this,” Tapp says. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Once they’ve got the taste for blood, there’s no going back. They’re murderers, and I’m not going to pretend that they’re anything else.”

Claudette isn’t surprised, but she’s a little disappointed; she’d thought that being a detective might mean that he would want to get to the truth, whether their hypothesis holds any weight or not. Meg rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue at him.

“Anyone else not want to be involved?” Dwight asks. Feng clicks her tongue.

“We’re trying to change the rules of the game,” she says. “I don’t think we can do that.” Meg starts to protest, but she continues, “At the end of the day, the killers kill, the survivors survive. I do not think we will be able to change those roles. Especially if they are tortured for failure. I think it is okay for you to try talking with them, but somebody needs to be playing by the rules or we are all guaranteed to die. I will focus on generators. It’s what I’m best at, and it will at least open up the hatch if talking doesn’t work.”

“That sounds sensible,” Dwight says approvingly. David nudges Feng’s shoulder and she nudges him back, trying not to smile.

“I’ll focus on generators too,” Jake says. “I’m not… good with people.”

“Same here,” Laurie says. “I hate those bastards. They’re all just like Michael to me.”

“I don’t think I can talk to the killers,” Quentin chimes in. “Freddy is… a monster. He’s disgusting. He’s evil. I won’t try to stop you guys, but I don’t think this is going to work. Maybe some of them have been coerced or forced into this, but it’s just as likely they’re all murderers and they were picked for this because they’d be good at it, and they’d enjoy it. Amanda wanted us dead, even if she was talking to you. She _wanted_ to kill us.”

“I mean, he’s right there,” Dwight says awkwardly, mostly aimed towards Meg, who shakes her head.

“She didn’t want to kill me until she felt I’d betrayed her,” she says. “She was angry, and then she went on that long rant about like, meat, and people not being worth saving, and it felt like maybe that was something deeper. In the Nightmare, she said that this John guy had ‘saved’ her. Maybe she feels like she was saved and it wasn’t enough. She feels… hopeless. She told me things only ever get worse, and that I’d better accept that before I got hurt. It’s not the same, but like Claudette said the Hillbilly thinks all he can do is hurt people? I think Amanda feels kinda the same way. Kinda. Everything hurts and nobody is worth anything and it doesn’t matter if she kills us because we’re irredeemable. Unsaveable. Is that a word? Nonsaveable. Saveless. None of those sound right.”

“Those definitely aren’t words,” Jake says, grinning when she sticks her tongue out at him.

“Listen,” Kate says. “We might as well try. Ain’t no harm in hopin’ for the best, even if we end up dead. That happens most trials anyway. I don’t blame y’all who don’t want any part in this, I know it’s a big ask, but it’s better to have tried and lost than done nothin’ and never known if things can change. Life is a big ol’ rollercoaster, and we can either cling on and ignore the ride, or we can throw our hands up and see where it takes us.”

“I can’t think about this anymore,” Laurie says abruptly, standing from her log. Quentin stands automatically with her, then looks like he didn’t mean to. “This is crazy. The things these creatures have done to us…” She shakes her head. “They’ll never stop. Never.”

They all watch Laurie leave, a tense silence falling over the campfire. Quentin gestures awkwardly after her.

“I’m gonna go check she’s okay,” he says, and follows her into the trees. Tapp stands, scowling, and walks in the opposite direction, probably to brood. Claudette’s noticed he has a tendency to do that; go and sit alone and just think, a dark look on his face. Nobody follows him – he isn’t the most personable of them all. Dwight sighs.

“Does anyone need to sleep? We can set up a buddy system.”

“I’m still kinda beat,” Claudette admits. “My leg hurts, my stomach hurts, and I know I was asleep for the whole last trial but I feel like I haven’t slept for 10 years.”

“I’ll keep watch over you,” Jake says immediately. Dwight’s gaze drops down to where their hands are linked, and his eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

“Oh!” Claudette gives a minute shake of her head, and Dwight almost trips over his own words. “I mean, yeah, of course, that’s fine.”

“I’m tired,” Feng says.

“I’ll keep an eye,” David says, rotating his wrists and settling his arms into a boxing position. “See any o’ them cunts try getting’ past me.” Feng laughs, shoving his shoulder.

“I’m gonna wait,” Kate says, her eyes trained on where Laurie disappeared into the forest. Her normally bright face is drawn with worry. “Laurie might come back. I wanna see she’s doin’ alright.”

“I’d offer to keep watch for someone, but my eyes still aren’t that great,” Meg says apologetically. “Not particularly sleepy though.”

“I’ll keep watch over someone,” Nea says. “I don’t feel like sleeping.”

“You can watch over me, then,” Adam offers. “I could do with a nap. Dwight? Are you going to be sleeping, or watching?”

“I’ll stay up,” Dwight says, and Claudette rolls her eyes. Something she’s picked up from Meg, damn it.

“I can see the bags under your eyes from here,” she says. “You don’t have to look out for everyone else all the time, Dwight. Get some rest.”

Dwight tries to protest, but Nea insists that she can watch both him and Adam until Meg’s sight is back to 20/20, and she shoves a blanket at him in a way that makes it clear to him that refusing isn’t an option. Jake grabs a blanket for Claudette but doesn’t bother with a medkit, instead just patting his shoulder. Claudette leans against him, the scent of the woods clinging to his puffy jacket filling her nose. His arm wraps around her and she shuffles closer, letting out a deep breath and feeling remarkably safe despite the Nightmare with Max. She trusts that Jake will wake her if he sees anything wrong.

As she falls asleep, the murmuring of the other survivors fading, she feels Jake’s lips press briefly against the top of her head and smiles.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Terrible things used to happen at Lery's Memorial Institute; those things ended long ago, but their echo still lives on in someone's nightmare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning in this chapter for gore & self harm!

Claudette’s breaths gradually even out as she falls asleep, and Jake imagines for a brief moment what they could’ve been like if they weren’t trapped here. Maybe they’d be on a couch, or in a bed, and he could curl around her and feel her body against his as he fell asleep. Maybe they’d be able to do normal shit that couples do; get a flat, get a dog – or a cat, seeing as Claudette prefers them. One of each? – go grocery shopping together. Jake imagines coming home and finding her deep in research at her computer, writing yet another biology paper, bags under her eyes but her fingers still tap-tapping away at her keyboard. He imagines kissing her cheek, the way she’d smile at him… the same way she did when she woke up in his arms and realised it was him, but without the fear that had been haunting him even as he watched her leg grow itself back.

Jake looks down at her, the angle awkward but one he wouldn’t change for anything. Claudette’s face is mushed against his jacket, and he thinks that she might actually be drooling on it, which is gross but somehow adorable at the same time because it’s her.

“You and her, huh?” Nea says, blunt as ever. Meg peers at her.

“Who and who?” she asks.

“Jake and Claudette,” Nea says, and Meg lets out an ‘ooooh’.

“I thought Claud was gay?”

“She is,” Jake says shortly.

“But you’re…”

“Butch,” Jake says, grimacing. He didn’t want to come out to any of the others if he’s honest. He’s a private person, and as far as he’s concerned it’s not their business, but he doesn’t want the others to get the wrong impression. It’s not like he wants people to think he’s a man, necessarily. He just doesn’t want them to look at him and think woman straight away.

“Oh,” Meg says. “Cool! King of confusing gender presentation. Or uh, Queen?”

“King’s good,” Jake says, trying not to grin with the relief of a positive reaction.

“So yer not a lad?” David asks from across the campfire, and Jake startles. He’d honestly forgotten that David was also there and listening.

“I’m nonbinary. And a lesbian,” he says reluctantly, wishing a little that a trial would start up so he could just pretend this never happened. “I just like to present more masculinely. I don’t mind what gender people think I am. I’m just Jake.”

“Should I ‘ave been callin’ ya somethin’ else, or is he alright?” David asks, which Jake is surprised by. It must show on his face, because David laughs and says, “Listen, I don’ talk about it, but I weren’t born with these pecs. ‘Ad to get what was on top taken off first, if ya get my drift. I know some shit ‘bout gender. Bunch o’ bollocks, ain’t it?”

“You’re trans?” Jake blurts out, and David laughs.

“Yeah, me scars just faded out nice. Look, if yer look close ya can kinda see ‘em.” He pushes the skin of his chest with one hand and Jake can just about see the thin lines of scar tissue. “Good thing about nothin’ changin’ in this place is that not ‘avin’ hormones doesn’t matter. Reckon I’d be goin’ fuckin’ nuts if I started detransitionin’ in ‘ere.”

“I was on T for a while, but just long enough to get my voice deeper,” Jake says. “I didn’t really care about any of the other effects. My facial hair is kinda cool though, but it takes… _took_ ages to grow when I was in the real world.”

“I naturally get a lot of facial hair,” Meg says, “But it’s so light that nobody ever noticed. Once a girl pointed it out and I shaved it all off, but then it just itched like fuck growing back in and nobody else even noticed there was anything different.”

“Can’t believe there’s been other genderfuckers in here this whole time and I never even knew,” Nea grumbles.

“You too?” Meg exclaims. “Fuck me, d’you think there are any cis people in this hellhole?”

“Entity said trans rights,” Nea says, and Meg lets out a howl of laughter, quickly shushed by a hand over her mouth.

“They’re sleeping,” Nea hisses, but she’s grinning. Meg crosses her eyes and presumably licks Nea’s palm, because she yanks it away like Meg’s face is suddenly on fire. “Gross!”

There’s the sound of soft footsteps against the dirt, and Jake looks up to see Kate and Laurie returning from the treeline, Quentin following them at a distance. Jake hadn’t even noticed Kate leaving; he feels bad for a second, and then remembers that she’d said she was staying up anyway, so she didn’t particularly need watching.

“Hey!” Meg pipes up, squinting. “You guys trans?”

“Are we what?” Laurie asks, nonplussed, and Kate shakes her head.

“Transgender, hun,” she says to Laurie, who doesn’t look particularly enlightened. “I’ll explain to you later.”

“Why?” Quentin asks cautiously, and Meg perks back up. She’d looked kinda dejected for a moment, like her all-trans survivor dreams had been crushed.

“Turns out a bunch of us are!” she says. “Me, David, Jake, Nea, we’re all trans, dude!”

“And I guess we don’t need to come out ourselves now, you’re doing it for us,” Nea says sharply. Meg looks appropriately chastised.

“Sorry, I got excited. Promise I won’t tell anyone else. Sorry guys.”

“It’s cool, just think next time,” Nea says, and David shrugs. Jake stays quiet; it’s not cool, but the information’s out there now. No taking it back.

“I’m trans,” Quentin says shyly. Meg hoots.

“Quentin you legend!” she cries, leaping up and in his general direction; he manages to catch and steady her, laughing as she presses an exaggerated kiss to his cheek. “Wait, holy shit, I can see your face! Properly!”

“Your sight’s back?”

“Well, I can see close stuff,” Meg says, widening and narrowing her eyes in turn. “The trees are still kinda blurry. I’m not automatically dead meat in a trial, at least! I can do gens and see totems and shit. I’ll just have to hope that it’s not Myers or, like… the Wraith?”

“Hopefully you won’t be in a trial ‘til you’re fully healed,” Kate says, tugging Laurie to sit on a log with her. “Claudette too.”

“I wouldn’t hope too hard,” Nea mutters.

\--

Feng wakes up in a trial, but weird. It’s Lerys Memorial Institute, familiar grey walls and mazelike corridors, but there are no pallets or generators in sight, and the lights aren’t flickering. There are no patches of grass pushing impossibly up through the concrete, and what is usually filthy is relatively clean, though not spotless. Feng can still hear screams like the ones on the televisions in the center of the map, but after a moment she realises that those aren’t the normal screams. These are real.

This is a Nightmare, she realises, her stomach dropping. She taps against her thighs, one two three four, trying to swallow her fear. This must be the Doctor’s nightmare; it’s his lair, after all. Is this because of what happened last trial? Feng remembers the Doctor’s wide, mad eyes as he stared at her.

“Shit,” she whispers, shuffling into a corner and curling up in a ball. “Wake up, wake up!” Claudette’s mutilated leg flickers behind her eyelids, and she hits herself on the thigh until it goes away. “Please, wake up, wake up!”

It doesn’t work. Feng opens her eyes and she’s still at the Institute.

 _If I just wait here, I have to wake up eventually, yes?_ She reassures herself. _I can’t sleep forever._

Another scream echoes down the corridor, distinctly masculine and unmistakeably in agony. Feng finds herself torn between staying where she is and moving closer to the source of the sound, feeling absolutely that the natural course of the Nightmare would be to find whatever’s making that noise. It’s something between her own curiosity and an irresistible pull, as though the Nightmare itself is trying to drag her along. Footsteps reverberate along the corridor, and the decision is made for her; Feng darts into the closest room, trying not to focus on the restraints attached to the beds in there, and ducks underneath one of the beds, watching someone in a black suit walk past the doorway without noticing anything amiss. He looks like a normal person but without any real details, like he was created from a generic template. There’s absolutely nothing remarkable or memorable about him.

So he’s not real, Feng thinks, just background noise. An NPC. That doesn’t mean he’s harmless though, so she should try to stay out of sight.

That pull starts to get stronger, but she realises that it doesn’t feel as though she _specifically_ is being pulled. It’s more like… gravity, indiscriminate and all-encompassing. Walking away from the centre of this place feels as impossible as resisting gravity itself, and so she follows it, creeping along walls and hopping silently through windows. The NPC was going the same way; to whatever the Doctor is doing or experiencing, presumably, the entire reason this place is existing as it is right now. Feng cracks her knuckles, one hand and then the other, and resists the urge to scratch nervously at her forearms.

What could be the Doctor’s Nightmare? The Hillbilly was obviously raised in some kind of basement hellhole, so that makes sense, but it’s not something they could have predicted. The Pig’s Nightmare was based – they’re all pretty sure – on something that happened in her life, or perhaps the thing that ended her life. Perhaps the Entity doesn’t have much imagination, which makes Feng grin briefly to herself.

Feng wonders, for a moment, if the modifications to his skull and face happened to him before he came to the Entity’s realm, but then decides that only the Entity could do something so grotesque to a person. Whatever his Nightmare is, it most likely is no good to try guessing what it will be before it happens. She can’t strategize, and there’s no team to back her up if her defences are breached.

Feng takes a moment to just breathe, tapping her fingers against her thighs until it feels a little easier. She’s certainly not a social person – never has been, and her spiralling mental health didn’t help that at all – but knowing that, irl, her team had her back, and that here the other survivors will help her if she falters… it’s something she values, even if she doesn’t say it. Being in this place completely devoid of allies hits harder than she would’ve expected.

She may not be in her sport anymore, but she’s still the Shining Lion. She can do this. Emboldened, Feng creeps forwards, hearing more screams but not letting herself hesitate. _This is just a different game_ , she thinks. _You can still win it, if you are just careful._

The screams are closer, more hoarse, as though the one screaming has injured his throat with the force of it. The origin of the screams is the central room Feng has run through more times than she can count, usually marked by a rusted hook and generator somewhere in the circle of debris. Feng creeps closer, peering over a windowsill. There is neither of those things this time, just medical monitoring equipment letting out intermittent beeps that Feng doesn’t know the meaning of. Another scream rings out, and she makes her eyes focus on the figure strapped into a bed in the centre of the circular room, spotlighted like a pinned insect under inspection.

He’s in one of the beds that usually litter the Institute, leather restraints tied tightly around his wrists. Feng can’t see his face – his feet are towards her, his heaving chest blocking his head from view – but she can hear the whimpers between the screams now that she’s this close, the rasp of his breaths.

 _The Doctor?_ She wonders, but this man looks smaller. The Hillbilly did too, in his dream, she remembers Claudette saying. He was a child. This helpless, crying figure could well be the Doctor.

“You are being most resistant to treatment,” says a hard-faced man, standing by the restrained man with a hand resting on a dial. “You know you are sick, Herman. You have to be treated for it.”

“I'm not sick!” screams the restrained man, writhing in his bindings. “I have cured- I have cured them, their illnesses are, must be treated, you must let me out to treat them before their SICKNESSES spread-”

The hand on the dial twists and Feng can feel the pulse of electricity that crackles through the machine even from this distance. The man's screams overtake his words, his voice breaking into a thin and reedy whine. The stench of heated flesh and electricity and urine hangs heavy in the air.

“STAMPER!” cries the restrained man, once the dial is twisted back to its neutral position. His voice is ragged with screams and Feng can see tremors running through his legs despite the machine's current inactivity, and for a few moments he's silent as his whole body shakes with a seizure, grunts forcing their way out from behind – presumably – clenched teeth. “STAMPER!”

“Release your mind, Herman,” says the man at the dial, impassive. “You have gone too far in your research, you have embarrassed the Institute with your deviancy. Project Awakening was supposed to unlock the human mind, but instead,”

 

“I had unlocked the very secrets of the psyche itself!” spits the bound man, Herman. “You gave me the tools, you gave me the subjects and I have done nothing but excel! I am so very close to curing humanity of itself, and you would stop me, would destroy my mind, prevent me from using my knowledge! Stamper, you must-”

“I must do nothing,” says the man at the dial, presumably 'Stamper'. His shape flickers, hurting Feng's eyes, and then suddenly his head is flayed open, the scalp peeled back from his crown and hanging over his face like the petals of some grotesque flower. Feng lets out a terrified squeak and shrinks back, almost falling, but luckily it goes unnoticed. She can't look away from the mutilated flesh and metal lodged in his brain, where the skull itself has been carved out; electrodes have been tucked between the remaining bone and the brain, speckled across the grey matter in sizzling multitudes. “You did this to me,” Stamper says, and his voice seems to crackle and swell throughout the room.

“You rat, you foul bastard!” screams Herman. “I did what you wanted me to do, I got all the answers you wanted! You told me to do anything necessary to achieve the objective and I DID, I pushed the boundaries of science as we know it, I transcended mere humanity, I-”

Stamper twists the dial, Herman cutting himself off again with an agonised howl. Feng winces, pressing herself against the wall even though nobody has seen her yet.

“You deserved everything you got!” Herman spits. “You made me into this, you, you, my mind, it is no longer my own, there is something bigger at work here and you would prevent my learning! I am touched by God itself, it has let me see their tainted souls, their disease, all of your disease! I am the CURE, I can cure you all, you cannot do this to me!” He struggles with renewed fervour, leather of his cuffs creaking loud enough that Feng can hear them over the buzzing of the machines when he pauses in his rant to focus on escape.

“You certainly are a tenacious patient, Herman,” says Stamper sedately, shaking his head. Feng watches nauseously, unable to tear her eyes away, as the movement makes the flaps of his dissected scalp quiver. “We shall have to use maximum power levels to ensure this discipline takes hold.”

“I AM NOT ONE OF MY PATIENTS!” Herman roars, and this time when he strains against the bindings, the one around his left wrist snaps, his body lurching upwards before the other straps halt it with enough force to wrench his right shoulder in a way that Feng thinks may have pulled it from its socket. Herman's freed hand clasps the leather around his other wrist and tugs, then roughly pushes the shoulder back into place.

Now that he's sitting up, Feng can see his face. He has dark skin, peppered with visible droplets of sweat, the veins popping out in his forehead and neck. His hair is cropped close to the skull, electrodes at his temples fizzing and sparking; he scrapes them off his head with clumsy, enraged hands, then presses his palms against his eyes. When he lowers them, Feng can see that his eyes are mismatched, one iris dark brown and the other a dead white, the sclera red-tinged and heavily veined with strain. He would be handsome, Feng thinks, if not for the manic air to his expression and posture. There's no doubt in her mind that this Herman guy is the Doctor; those wild eyes are hauntingly familiar.

A moment later, what she already knows is confirmed. Herman lets out a terrifying giggle that she's heard many times before, breathy and deranged, and stands without even seeming to notice that the ankle restraints are still there, as though he's suddenly immune to something as basic as human shackles. They snap without any effort, and he's striding towards Stamper, who is wearing a perfectly formed expression of fearful apprehension that Feng suddenly realises is just another part of this fabrication. Stamper isn't real any more than the nameless black suit she saw. Probably nothing here is real other than the Doctor and Feng herself. A simulation.

The Doctor, because there's no doubt that whoever Herman was has been lost to the Doctor's madness long ago, grabs hold of Stamper's bloody face and presses his thumbs against his eyes, uncaring of the flaps of skin brushing wetly against his knuckles.

“You have never understood my brilliance,” the Doctor snarls. “I know, I know, you wanted such little, insignificant things, nothing that mattered – I can break the human mind, I will rebuild it, I will be more than you could have ever imagined, you fucking moron, frightened of the power you wanted me to have! What good is information, interrogation, when I can control the human brain itself, when I can become God, I can cure you all, remove your impurities, your corrupted, broken components? I will destroy and remake you all, remove your sickness, create the human mind anew from the pieces of the wreckage!”

His thumbs press in further, blood beginning to drip down Stamper's face and Herman's wrists as Stamper's mouth opens in an almost-soundless scream. Electricity begins to crackle around his fingertips, burns forming on Stamper's skin where they touch, and Feng's seen this happen to her friends far too many times, experienced it herself seven separate times. She takes off running, her dead legs toppling her briefly to the side as she stands too fast and the blood doesn't have time to redistribute itself. Feng glances over her shoulder when she crashes into a monitor, which clatters to the floor, and sees the Doctor's head lurch to the side at the sound. She freezes, and for a moment she's back in that shower cubicle, the Doctor's mad eyes locked with hers. The moment ends when he flexes his hands and crushes Stamper's mutilated cranium with a wet, red sort of noise, and as she takes off running again he drops Stamper's limp body to the ground and follows.

Feng zig-zags through several rooms, then leaps over a windowsill and almost trips over a pile of boxes just below it, knocking one off the top of the pile. It spills wires that tangle around her legs and make it so that she has to pause to free herself, hands shaky with terror and Stamper's skull collapsing like an egg in repeat behind her eyelids when she blinks. Her heart is hammering even louder than it does in a trial, threatening to choke her. She manages to get herself out of the wires and bolt across the room as the Doctor becomes visible through the window, both of his eyes white with electricity now, any humanity in his gaze lost. An unhinged giggle tears its way from his throat as he steps through in pursuit.

 _I have to wake up,_ Feng thinks desperately. _I have to wake up or he will crush my head like he crushed Stamper's, and I will die before I can do anything to stop him. I have to wake UP!_

Feng vaults another window, sprints until she can't hear the Doctor's footsteps anymore, rounds a corner and crouches behind a pile of formless medical equipment that the Entity obviously hasn't bothered to make realistic; it's far enough from the central room that the Doctor was probably never meant to be here.

“Wake up!” she hisses, thumping her head against the wall a few times. That just gives her a headache, but doesn't break her out of it. How do they usually wake up in a trial against Kreuger? Either fuck up on a generator, on healing, or get woken up by someone else. Or get hooked, of course.

None of those are options here. Feng presses her head into her hands, and then is hit by the realisation that of _course,_ woken up by someone else! David is watching over her body by the campfire – all she needs to do is injure herself in a way that David will see, and then he'll wake her up before the Doctor can get his deranged hands on her. _Something sharp, something sharp..._ If she cuts her face, David will definitely see it. She just needs to find something she can do it with. The Entity-made machinery visible in the room is vague enough that there's no sharp edges to use.

If she wants to find something solid enough to be useful, she'll have to go back to the centre of the Nightmare, where everything has to look real for the Doctor to believe it. There must be something sharp enough to do real damage among the realistic medical equipment. Feng starts to rise up from her crouch, but pauses.

Wait. There's no need for a weapon. She doesn't need to be properly wounded, just enough to be visible. Feng takes a deep breath and rakes her nails down her cheek, feeling the skin rise into welts. It doesn't quite break – she's never been particularly good with pain outside of her compulsions – but hopefully the raised red lines might be noticeable enough if she doesn't have time to find something better, something more obvious. The Doctor's footsteps and laughter have been echoing in circles around her for long enough now that he must be close to finding her.

Feng claws her face again. It stings, tears welling in her eyes. The Doctor's laughing is closer. Feng claws at her face again, and feels it draw blood this time, skin and blood under her fingernails. The Doctor comes running into the room through an opposite doorway and slows to a stop, his eyes fixed on her. He doesn't have the spiked stick he uses in trials, but there's still gore covering his hands, a reminder that he doesn't need a weapon to do damage outside of a trial.

“You,” he says, giggling. Even without the metal stretching his mouth wide there's something unnaturally distended about his smile, something involuntary. “Have you come to be treated? Finally, you understand that your illness must be cured?”

“DAVID!” Feng screams, raking both hands down her face, feeling blood drip down her neck. “DAVID, PLEASE, WAKE ME UP!”

“Now now, settle down,” the Doctor says, moving carefully closer, his hands clenched into claws as though he wants to reach out and grab her. “Let me re-educate you.” He giggles. “The human mind is so... malleable, when you truly understand it. I can cure you of the ultimate impurity – the human condition! My treatment has been perfected over years of study, and it has very few side effects to concern yourself over. Co-operation will make the process much simpler, but an unwilling patient is still one that can be cured. It is in your best interest not to resist.”

“DAVID!” Feng cries, tears making the cuts on her face sting. _Salt to the wound,_ she thinks, a little hysterically. There's no aura around the Doctor here, no Madness, but she still feels as though she's succumbing to it regardless. Her fear is making it hard to do anything but scream.

The Doctor lets out a pitying noise. “Another patient in need of extreme measures,” he says. “I can see it, see your sickness, see how you yearn to be pure and clean – I can fix you, oh I know you, I see you, see your foul illness eating you from the inside, rotting you away. You, you, I can remake you, destroy you and create you anew, I can fix it!”

“Leave me alone!” Feng shouts, wondering hopelessly why David hasn't woken her yet. “I don't want your fucking treatment! You're mad!”

The Doctor giggles. He's close enough that Feng could reach out and touch him, if she was so compelled. “Mad? MAD? You foolish little girl, I am not the mad one. I have found the cure, I have cracked the human psyche, found the keys to the mind _itself!”_

“ _You_ are cracked!” Feng shouts, remembering the word from David. The Doctor giggles.

“Oh, I will enjoy your treatment,” he says, and lunges.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> meg got overexcited and forgot that it's everyone's right to come out when they choose - remember everyone, outing people without their consent isn't cool.
> 
> the next scene is written, but i want to post it together with another one, so it may be a little while until the next update! thank you to everyone who's still reading - i love you all! <3 please leave a comment if the urge takes you!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of Feng's Nightmare, some coping is required.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for mild self harm, alcohol and brief emeto!

“Fucking hell!” David shouts, interrupting a conversation Meg and Kate were having about country vs pop-punk. Everyone turns to look at him, even Claudette, who is woken up by the noise and peers blearily in his direction. Jake strokes a hand automatically over her hair, enjoying the sensation of it against his palm and the warm huff of air she lets out against his neck as she wakes up and stretches.

“Wh's happ'nin'?” she asks through a yawn.

“Feng, she's 'aving a fuckin' Nightmare! I can't snap 'er out of it!”

That gets them all up; Claudette practically falls over Jake to reach her friend, and Meg – who had been sleepily leaning against Nea – is on Feng in a second. Jake peers over the cluster of survivors and sees that Feng's face is marred by huge, bloody scratches, as though she's been clawing at her own face.

“She won't wake up!” David shouts, high-pitched with stress. “I shook 'er and she's still asleep, I dunno what to do!”

“Let me through,” Quentin says, quiet but authoritative, and they all part like the Red Sea. Quentin hurries to Feng's side and shakes her shoulders roughly, but she doesn't wake up. He pushes one of her eyelids up and shines a flashlight into it, the hand steady despite everything, and they can all see Feng's pupils are dilated despite the light, and her eyes are flicking in different directions in the rapid way of the dreaming. Quentin's medkit is tucked underneath his arm – he drops it to the ground and unzips it in one swift motion, pulling out a long needle that makes Jake queasy to look at. Meg seems to share the sentiment.

“What the fuck is that?” she blurts out.

“Adrenaline,” Quentin says grimly. “This will wake her up.”

“Can't adrenaline like that kill you if you're not in anaphylaxis?” Claudette asks, alarmed. Jake doesn't know what anaphylaxis is but Claudette's expression is drawn and horrified, so he knows that _she_ knows what she's talking about.

“Please trust me,” Quentin pleads. “I know about nightmares. I've lived nightmares. I nearly died in nightmares before I ever came here, my whole class was murdered by Freddy goddamn Kreuger in their dreams, he almost killed Nancy, I- I can't let anyone else die like this! This will wake her up, I promise!”

Claudette hesitates, but when another row of scratchmarks appear on Feng's face and she lets out a moan of discomfort, blood trickling down the sides of her face into her ears, she clutches Jake's hand and nods. Quentin takes a deep breath, and plunges the syringe into Feng's chest.

Meg covers her eyes, looking faintly green, and Jake clutches nauseously back at Claudette's hand in his. Everyone watches, silent, as more bloody welts drag their way down Feng's face. “Please wake up,” Quentin whispers. “Please, please, Feng Min, please wake up.”

Feng gasps, her whole body spasming, and shoots upright, nearly headbutting Quentin in the face. Her hair is sticking out on end with static electricity, current crackling through her and into the dirt, and her eyes are wide, wild.

“DAVID!” she shouts, and bursts into tears. David, looking stricken, hurries forwards and gathers her in his arms.

“I'm 'ere, I'm 'ere,” he says. Feng shoves him hard enough that he falls on his ass, looking an interesting mix of baffled and hurt. Poor David, Jake thinks; he acts all tough, and he is, but he does wear his heart on his sleeve.

“What took you so long?” Feng demands, furious, and then dissolves into sobs.

David, tearful, says, “We couldn't wake yer up, I'm so fuckin' sorry Feng, I couldn' getcha t' wake up-”

“It's not his fault!” Nea says. “Quentin had to give you a shot to wake you up. You were in deep! David was trying, he really was. Don't fucking blame him!”

“I thought he was going to kill me!” Feng shouts at her, eyes bright in the scratched mess of her face. “I thought he was going to crush my eyeballs into my head like popping a grape and I thought I was alone! I thought you were not coming for me!”

“Now, guys,” Dwight begins.

“Of course I was, ya daft fuckin' bint!” David shouts at Feng, and Jake realises that he's actually crying as well, tears sliding down into his beard. It's the first time he's seen David cry where he hasn't been literally being murdered at the time. “Y'really thought I'd leave you to die?”

“I'm sorry!” Feng shouts back. “I know I should have thought you were coming, but I was so afraid, and he killed Stamper with his bare hands alone, and he was talking about sickness and cures and he was going to, to-” Feng lets out a cry, burying her face in his chest and just sobbing. David jumps like he's been shocked, which Jake thinks he might have been, seeing his hair stick briefly up with static. David doesn't move away though, just pulls her closer and wraps his arms around her, ignoring the fizzles of electricity that are still leaping off her every few moments. They can all see that Feng is trembling like a leaf, shivers wracking her body.

“Fuckin' Doctor,” David murmurs, rubbing circles on her back. “Wait 'til I get me 'ands on that cunt.” Feng laughs wetly into his shirt, sniffling.

“Thank you for not leaving me,” she says, so quietly that they can all barely hear it.

“We're a team,” David says firmly. “No man left be'ind. Or, er, woman, or anyone else. It were Quentin who knew what t' do, though. 'E saved ya.”

Feng shifts her head so that she can look at Quentin, who looks like he might collapse with relief at any moment. She gives him a small, genuine smile.

“Thanks,” she says, and pulls back from David. There are electrical burns dotted across her scalp, patches of the hair burned away; Jake dreads to think what would've happened if they had been even a few seconds later.

Meg, having held herself back for long enough, throws herself at them both, she and David sandwiching Feng between them. “I'm so, so glad you're okay,” she says fiercely.

“Yeah, you still haven't taught me that trick you use to stop gens blowing up in your face all the time,” Nea says. “No getting out of that one, girl.” Feng grins at her.

“We can all be thankful that she's okay later,” Dwight says, ever practical. “We need to treat those scratches as best we can before they scab over.”

“I can do it,” Claudette says immediately, using Jake's firm hold on her hand to push herself to her feet. She grabs a medkit from behind a log and limps steadily over to where Feng is cradled between the other two survivors, smiling at them all. “Come on, you lot, move out of the way so I can see what I'm working with.”

Meg, characteristically stubborn, just manoeuvres herself so that Feng is sat practically in her lap, Meg's chin hooked over her shoulder. Feng leans back against her without complaint, despite her usual disdainful attitude towards PDA. Jake thinks that even she needs physical comfort after such an ordeal, and really, it's more trouble than it's worth to try and weasel your way out of Meg's clutches once she's got hold of you. Jake has, unfortunately, been in that position multiple times.

“Stop staring,” Feng says, sounding exhausted. Everyone realises simultaneously that they're just sat watching her, relief making them all still, and the campfire is suddenly buzzing with activity as everyone finds something to do, Dwight assigning tasks with the calm focus of someone who needs to be busy in a crisis. Jake, at a loss, stays by Claudette, handing her alcohol wipes and cotton balls when she reaches out for them.

Quentin helps clean the wounds, and soon it's easy to see what they're dealing with. Claudette lets out a sigh of relief and hands Feng a cup of water, which she gulps quickly down.

“They probably won't even scar if you don't pick at them,” she says, smiling. “Hopefully in a couple of weeks it'll be like nothing ever happened.” Feng nods. “Get some proper rest, for now. Nobody's had two Nightmares so far, and I'm sure you won't be the first. You need to sleep to heal.”

“I don't want to sleep,” Feng says. Her poor face is covered in patches of taped-on gauze, but the redness of her eyes and the uninjured skin around them is still starkly obvious. Jake feels a stab of sympathy, and vows to get her the best toolbox he can find in the next couple trials.

“Quentin, do you have any more of that adrenaline?”

“I've got another two syringes,” Quentin says. “I can wake you up again if I need to.”

“No,” Feng says stubbornly. “I don't want to sleep.”

“Feng,” David starts, but she shakes her head. The bald, burned patches look more stark, now that she's not completely covered in blood. Jake realises that they're, god, they're fingerprints. The Doctor had held her head long enough to burn her.

“I have some glucose pills in my jacket,” Quentin says. “I can give you one. It'll keep you going for now, but you'll crash later. You're gonna have to sleep at some point.”

“Later,” Feng says. “Glucose now.” When Quentin hurries off to grab his jacket from where it's slung over one of the logs, she turns to David. “Do you remember what you offered me, after the trial with the Doctor?”

“The uh, the moonshine?” David says, seeming shocked. Jake feels a little insulted that David's never offered him any alcohol, but shakes it off; whatever happened in the Doctor trial, none of them had talked about it with the others, so it must've been out of the ordinary. Jake's lucky enough to just be straight up murdered most trials. No nonsense.

“I want it,” Feng says.

“Wait, we had booze this whole time?” Meg says indignantly. “Kept that one quiet, Davey-boy.”

“I thought...” David starts, then trails off, giving Feng a long, searching look. “You sure, kid?”

“Yes,” Feng says emphatically. “David, please.”

“Yeah David, please,” says Meg, who looks more excited at the prospect of getting hammered than Jake's seen her since Laurie agreed to let Meg act out the whole Lord of the Rings saga from memory for her, with voices and costumes and everything. Meg holding a tattered shroud to her face and brandishing a stick as she tried to do Gandalf's deep voice had made Jake smile to himself for days afterwards, even though he did his best to not show how much he enjoyed watching her.

“It's really for emergencies,” David says, but he sounds like he might be coming around.

“This is an emergency,” Feng says.

David glances at her lap, and makes up his mind. “A'ite,” he says, looking conflicted. “I'll go get the bottle.” Jake looks where he had and sees Feng's hands are picking at her thighs, carving little red welts into the skin. A couple have already started bleeding. Jake nudges Claudette as subtly as he can manage, nodding towards them. Claudette follows his gaze and startles.

“Feng! What are you doing?” Feng stays silent, something unmoored in her eyes as her hands keep scratching, so Claudette just hurries forwards and starts taping gauze over the bleeding areas, gently scolding her with that worried, motherly tone she always uses when someone she cares about is hurt. Jake feels a wave of warm fondness rise up in his chest, and quashes it before anyone can catch him giving Claudette soft eyes.

Quentin arrives back to Claudette patching up Feng's thighs, and gives her an empathetic look. “Here,” he says, holding out a hand. In his palm rests a purplish, chalky-looking tablet. “It's raspberry flavoured, though it doesn't really taste all that much like raspberries to me.”

“Thank you,” Feng says distantly, and swallows the pill down without even asking for water. Claudette gives her some anyway, Meg coaxing her hand around the cup until Feng starts holding it for herself. Feng's hand is shaking as she drinks. David, his face suspiciously pink and clean as though he's scrubbed the tears from his skin, comes back a few minutes later with a cloudy glass bottle in his hands. Hands, plural, because that thing is massive, Jake thinks in surprise.

“To think,” Meg laments, making grabby hands around Feng, “We could've been getting pissed this whole time.”

“What if there's a trial?” Claudette asks. Meg shrugs, managing to snag the bottle from David's hands and nearly dropping it on Feng when it's heavier than she expected.

“Then we'll die happy,” Meg declares, leaning back so she can take a long, deep drink from the bottle. “Eugh!” She presses her face into her elbow, nose wrinkled, eyes screwed shut. “That's nasty as _fuck_ , ack.”

“Hand it back over then,” David says, but she's already drinking again, making an exaggerated expression of disgust as she does so.

“Feng's turn,” Meg says when she's finished, coughing a little, and passes it forwards. Feng takes a swig without flinching, then another, and then puts it on the ground in front of her and sort of folds in half so her face rests on her knees, like she's just run out of steam. “Feng?”

“Mm,” Feng says.

“You... you okay?”

“Mm.”

“Someone pour me a cup,” Claudette says, downing the water left in Feng's cup so she can hold it out, wiggling it. “I love you guys, but I'm not passing that around like we're 16.”

David, shooting concerned looks at Feng, pours some moonshine into the cup, and Claudette takes a measured sip. She recoils so fast that she bumps her head into Jake's chin. “That's disgusting!”

Jake takes a sip over her shoulder and has to agree, but it's what they have, and they all definitely deserve a drink.

“Hey, what y'all drinkin' over there?” comes Kate's voice, and it turns into a real party.

-

“So then,” Meg slurs, “they'd click on the link, right, and they'd think they were going to something else, but they'd _click_ on the link and instead it'd be like 'daa-daa, daa-daa, da-da-da-da-da-da-”

“IIII, just wanna tell you how I'm fee-eelin'!” Kate sings, drunk but still somehow completely in tune. Meg shushes her loudly.

“That's not the first lyric!” Meg protests, flapping her hands at her until Kate holds hers up in surrender. “It goes like, it's like...”

“We've known each other for so long?” Claudette suggests – she doesn't sing it, just sort of lilts it pleasantly, and Jake leans over to give her a kiss on the cheek.

“NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP!” David shouts, and Meg forgets that she wanted the song from the beginning, beaming as she joins in.

“NEVER GONNA LET YOU DO-O-OWN! NEVER GONNA RUN AROUND AND, DESERT YOU!”

“Never gonna make you cry,” Quentin sings shyly, and Meg lets out an excited scream.

“NEVER GONNA SAYYYY GOODBY-Y-YE!”

“Wait, why is this funny?” Laurie asks, no clearer than she was when Meg started explaining 'Rick-rolling' to her.

“Because,” Meg starts, then frowns. “Because it is! It's like, uh, you think you're gonna read an article on fuckin', um,”

“Homoerotic undertones in Footloose,” Nea says.

“And then instead it's like, Rick Astley! Never gonna give you up! Never gonna let you do-o-own!”

As Meg continues singing, David and Quentin backing her up with the occasional interjection from Dwight and Nea, Laurie leans into Kate and whispers, “I still don't get it.”

Kate gives her a sloppy, drunk kiss on the cheek. Her breath smells like moonshine; so does Laurie's, though, so it doesn't really matter. “Don't worry about it, doll,” she says, grinning. “It only makes sense if y'know how a computer works, really.”

“We're from such different times,” Laurie says wistfully, stroking her hand down Kate's arm to interlock their fingers. Kate's chipped nail polish stands out brightly against their pale skin. “Do you... do you think you would've liked me? In the real world, I mean? If we weren't from such different times?”

“Are you kiddin'? You're super cute and funny and smart, an' you're so resilient. How could I not? If we ever get outta this hellhole I'm takin' you with me, you can be sure of that, love.”

Laurie presses her face against Kate's collarbone, embarrassed and pleased all at once. “I'm a pretty good cook,” she offers. “I'd make you breakfast in bed.”

Kate laughs. “What do I need a cooked breakfast for when I've got you all ready and waitin' in the bed?” she says coyly, and bursts out laughing when Laurie slaps her shoulder, flushing scarlet. “Sorry! Sorry, I had t-” she starts, but is cut off by Laurie's lips pressing against her own. Laurie's hand reaches up to tenderly cup Kate's cheek, and it's a few seconds before they move apart, Kate blinking with happy surprise.

“Had to shut you up somehow,” Laurie teases, grinning, and Kate laughs again, pressing a kiss against Laurie's jawline.

“You gotta try harder than that, darlin',” Kate murmurs, and tugs her back in for another kiss.

Meg has stopped singing at some point, and now she lets out an incoherent but congratulatory noise, snatching Claudette's mug from her hand to raise it sloppily in their direction, ignoring Claudette's quiet protest. Laurie buries her red face in Kate's shoulder, trying to smother her grin. Kate makes no such effort, planting a kiss on her hair and smiling beautifically around the campfire.

“T' love!” Meg shouts, pushing Claudette so that she falls against Jake, who rolls his eyes as he catches her. He's been drinking too, but he's still as quiet as ever, his bright eyes and flushed cheeks the only indication that he's any different than normal. The other survivors let out cheers, and most are more than happy to take the opportunity to drink.

Feng, who has been drinking steadily since the moonshine came out, not really participating in the conversation, takes the opportunity to retch subtly into a bush, David holding her hair back.

“You okay?” Claudette asks loudly, and when Feng gives her a thumbs up, wiping her other hand across her mouth, Claudette leaves her be, though she keeps a stern, tipsy eye on her just in case. Laurie's got half a mind to go over and check if she's really okay, or if there's any way she can help, but David seems to have it covered, taking his jacket off and draping it over her shoulders. Feng smiles up at him, a little wobbly, and shoves her nearly-empty mug at Quentin.

“Uh, no thanks,” Quentin says. He hasn't been drinking with the rest of them, just watching everyone get progressively drunker with a contentedness to his expression that Laurie hasn't seen before. Tapp hasn't been drinking either, but that's because he says someone has to stay on guard for trouble.

“C'mon, Quen'n,” Feng says. “Live a little.”

“I'm a sad and then sleepy drunk,” Quentin says apologetically. “It's better for everyone if I don't. Thanks, though.”

“Laurie!” Meg cries. “When, when did you say you're from?”

“1978,” Laurie says hesitantly. “Why?”

“The 80s!” Meg wails. “You missed the 80s! The _tunes,_ Laurie, the tunes...”

As Meg starts singing something about waking her up, her voice slurred a little too much now for Laurie to understand the words, Kate laughs against Laurie's cheek.

“There's a lotta music to catch you up on,” she says. “Most importantly mine, o' course. Meg'll be able to keep goin' for months.”

“It's nice to see her so happy,” Laurie says. “T'see everyone so happy. And I think I'm too drunk to be annoyed, even if her singing really isn't very good. Everything's spinning a little.”

“No more for you, then,” Kate says, kissing the top of her head and pushing their shared cup further away with her foot. Nea snags it and downs the remnants in one, winking at them both. She seems to be able to hold her drink almost as well as David, which is both a surprise and somehow not one at all.

“Will you sing for me?” Laurie asks, feeling very vulnerable for asking, for some reason. Kate kisses her cheek again and pulls her close, an arm warm and safe around Laurie's shoulder.

“Anytime, sweets,” she says, closing her eyes, and then begins to sing.

“ _Another show's off and runnin', dance with me 'cause a storm's a-comin'...”_

Laurie leans her head on Kate's shoulder, feeling the song vibrate in Kate's chest. Her eyelids feel so, so heavy; there's something so very safe about being near Kate, the alcohol taking away the anxious alertness usually dogging Laurie's every step, and she lets Kate's melodic voice tease her into a drifting sleep.

“ _Follow my boots, try to keep up! Dance with me, until sun up...”_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you everyone who has commented!! i love u all so much. hmu @chained2012 on tumblr if you want to talk dbd!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unfortunately, a respite can only last so long in the Entity's realm; fortunately, some familiar faces are involved in the trials, and some things may be about to change forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this has taken so long.... it's been a busy time, i had a family member very sick in hospital for a couple weeks and some other stuff going on! hope that you all enjoy this chapter, it was very engaging to write! warning for canon-typical injury and gore, but nothing else specific that i can think of! please lmk if i should've tagged something else.

The Entity leaves them be for a few hours, which is more than Meg would have ever hoped for, but as the moonshine begins to run dry the fog creeps through the campfire, a blanket of smog hiding the ground. Tapp swears. 

“This is a big one,” he says grimly. “This much fog means multiple trials at once.” 

“Of course it would choose now,” Laurie says, from within Kate’s arms. They’re both bundled up with the big winter jacket laid over the two of them, tipsy and sleepy, Kate having transitioned from singing to a melodic hum that drifts through the clearing. The fog begins to encircle them both and Laurie shifts out from under the jacket to watch the fog cling to her legs, pulling away from Kate without care. 

Kate watches the fog leave her and brushes her hand against Laurie’s thigh. The fog disperses and then swirls back into place. “I wish it could be me, darlin’,” she says, leaning forward to kiss her. 

“I don’t,” Laurie whispers against her lips. “I don’t.” 

“How many of us are going into a trial?” Dwight asks. “Put your hands up, quick!”

8 hands shoot into the air; only Feng, David, Kate, Jake and Dwight himself aren’t being picked. Claudette sighs. 

“Well, at least it’s two trials rather than three,” she says. “And I know that I, at least, am still pretty drunk, so this’ll be over fairly quick.” She presses a kiss to Jake’s cheek and then staggers upright, her still-healing leg and blood alcohol levels working together to nearly send her right back down. It’s really only her hand on Jake’s shoulder that keeps her standing.

“And at least you get a break for now,” Dwight says to Feng, who’s still drunk enough that she looks like she’ll throw up any second. She shrugs at him and buries her face in David’s shoulder. 

“Doesn’ m’tter,” she says indistinctly. “Soon’r ‘r later…”

“At least it ain’t now,” David says firmly. He’s been drinking too, but not as much as Feng; it’s pretty obvious that he feels responsible for her. 

“If anyone has any luck offerings, now’s probably the time to throw them in,” Dwight says. “You’re gonna need all the help you can get.”

A few salt pouches disappear into the flames, and Tapp even manages to throw in a jar filled with dark, murky liquid and torn-off lips. It’s a rare and distasteful offering to find, but it’s almost guaranteed to get them better equipment and odds in a trial. 

“At least some of us are sober,” Quentin mutters, and then the Fog takes them.

-

Meg’s vision clears, and she looks around, stifling a bizarre urge to giggle. She’s still  _ so _ drunk, fuck. The vertigo of coming back into consciousness almost makes her fall over and she staggers for a moment, catching herself on a rusted car. The metal catches her hand, cutting her palm open; she says, “Ow!” far too loudly and presses it against her shirt, frowning but still feeling giggly. 

So it’s the Autohaven Wreckers, today. Meg sees a totem nestled by the cars she fell against and just kicks it until it breaks with a noise like thunder. The Entity’s displeasure continues to echo after the thunder has stopped, pressing against her skull. Meg sticks her tongue out at the sky and crosses her eyes, then laughs again. “Fuck your dumb rules!” she shouts. “I just kicked your bones, bitch! Whatcha gonna do!” 

The pressure intensifies for a moment, then relents, the sky roiling for a few more seconds before it settles into the usual dark cloudscape, the moon shining brightly without dimension. Meg sticks her middle fingers up at it, still smiling, and then trips over one of the spilt bones and lands heavily on her coccyx with a yelp. 

“Meg?” Someone whispers, and Meg turns to see Nea creeping towards her through the long grass, grinning. 

“Nea!” Meg cries happily. Nea slaps a hand over her mouth. Meg licks it.

“Ew,” Nea says, holding her spit-wet palm out to help Meg stand back up. “Come on, idiot, we’ve got a trial to survive.”

“Speak for yourself,” Meg says, sniffing as haughtily as she can manage. “ _ I _ am going to lie down in this very soft grass, and look at the shitty moon.” 

“And die?” 

“And die,” Meg agrees, flopping down and starfishing, ignoring the rock digging into her side as she does. “Come on, what’s dying one more time? I wanna enjoy being drunk while it’s happening.”

Nea shakes her head. “I’ll leave you to it,” she says. “See you at the campfire, yeah?”

Meg doesn’t watch her go, staring up at the Entity’s sky. There aren’t any stars, which is something that doesn’t usually bother her, but right now it seems almost worse than the idea that she’s probably going to die. She’s going to die,  _ again _ , and she can’t even look at the stars before she does.

“Orion’s Belt,” Meg says, stretching up a hand to trace the shape of it in the air with her fingertip, imagining points of brightness spelling the constellation out. “Um, fuck. Oh, Orion. As well as his belt. Why do people say the belt like it’s separate?” Meg thinks about it for a second, but dismisses it. “Constellations. Constellations… Ursa Major?”

“What the fuck are you doing?” The Pig says, suddenly crouched right beside her. Meg can’t even be bothered to be afraid. 

“No stars,” she says mournfully, pointing. The pig mask tilts upwards, considering. “Trying to remember the constellations.”

“Are you high?” Amanda asks, somewhere between genuine and sarcastic, and Meg lets out a peal of laughter. 

“David had some moonshine,” she admits. “‘m absolutely wasted.”

“Where the hell did he get moonshine?”

“Dunno,” Meg admits. “I’ll ask for you.”

Amanda blows out a heavy breath, muffled through the mask. “The Entity never gives  _ me _ moonshine,” she says, a little resentful. 

“And the health insurance here is shit,” Meg says, grinning at Amanda when she hears a huff of laughter. 

“You can’t do this, Meg,” Amanda says, after a couple of quiet moments. “I’ve got a job to do. I can’t fuck up again.”

“Whatcha talkin’ to the meat for, then?” Meg asks, careless. She wonders for a moment if Amanda will just stab her right there and then, but she doesn’t, just sits there silently, mask still tilted up towards the sky. 

“You remember what you said to me, before?”

Meg squints, trying to remember, but her drunk brain can’t catch hold of the specifics of the memory; it flows over her like water over rocks in a riverbed. She shakes her head. “Sorry, ‘m drunk… can’t remember all of it right now.”

Amanda sighs audibly. “You said ‘shit can always get better’. And it’s dumb, it’s naieve. I said shit only ever gets worse and I meant it, and I know that’s how it goes because that’s the story of my fucking life. Anything that seems good can go bad quicker than you can blink, and it’s always my fault.”

“‘Manda,” Meg says sympathetically, feeling very much like a drunk girl in a bathroom comforting a stranger on their break-up; it’s weirdly familiar, despite the absurdity of the reality of the situation. She flops a hand out to hold Amanda’s, barely avoiding cutting herself again on the blade protruding from Amanda’s red sleeve. Their fingers brush, and Amanda twitches away. Meg lets her hand fall to the ground. 

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” Amanda admits. “I literally  _ killed you _ , Meg, more violently than I ever have before, and you were still trying to convince me that shit can get better. Who does that? I was killing you because I was mad, and I hated you, and I hated that you’d helped your friends, and you  _ apologised _ for tricking me so they could escape? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Many things,” Meg says wisely, folding her arms behind her head to cushion it. 

“Why aren’t you fucking scared right now?” Amanda demands, leaning abruptly over to block Meg’s view. Meg grumbles at her. “I could kill you, right here right now, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.” The tip of the knife presses against Meg’s abdomen, sharp even without any pressure behind it. “Why aren’t you afraid of me??” 

“You’re just a person,” Meg says, shrugging. “Dying is scary, sure, and it hurts, but you’re just like me. Messed up and hurting and kinda pretty, honestly, please don’t stab me for saying that, and you said that you have a ‘job to do’, so I’m guessing you didn’t choose to be here. It’s like when you have to work full-time at McDonalds because nowhere else is hiring, and you don’t really have a choice because you can’t afford your mom’s meds if you don’t, but it really sucks ass.” Meg thinks for a moment. “It’s like that but if you had to kill people instead, and the McDonalds was in an alternate reality that you couldn’t ever leave, and you probably got punished for not murdering people or something. Right?” She pauses. “Also I’m like,  _ really _ drunk right now.”

“Are you this ridiculous when you’re sober, or is this just a drunk Meg thing?” Amanda says. Meg grins up at the mask, feeling her cheeks dimple with it. 

“I’m a fucking party!” she exclaims, patting the mask with one hand and then making a disgusted face at the texture of the grimy material. “Can you take that off? It’s gross.”

“I don’t know if I can, in a trial,” Amanda says doubtfully, but Meg shakes her head. 

“You totally can, I ripped off the Shape’s mask one time and it came clear off, threw it away. I bet yours is the same. You want me to try?”

“You did what?” Amanda says disbelievingly, and Meg takes the opportunity to reach up and tug the mask clean off while she’s still processing. As soon as it’s off Amanda’s head she drops it on the grass, grimacing, and wipes her hands on her trousers. 

“You should really clean that,” she advises, looking up at Amanda and losing all her breath at once. 

Amanda’s visibly shocked, her eyes wide enough that the whites are visible above her irises, and there’s a smear of something that might be blood or might be mud or might be something else altogether across her forehead, like she absentmindedly scratched it without realising her hands were dirty. She looked different in the dream - her cheekbones weren’t quite as sharp, and her eyes are somehow duller. There was a spark in the nightmare, a fierce belief burning behind them; now she just mainly looks sad. Her hair is tangled and pressed flat to her skull by the weight of the mask. Meg feels herself slide from giggly, irreverent drunk to ‘on the brink of tears’ in less than a second. Amanda flinches back. 

“What?” she says defensively. Meg manoeuvres herself into a sitting position, swaying, and reaches out again. This time Amanda lets her take her hand. 

“Your hair,” she says miserably, reaching out with her other hand to finger-comb a few of the lank strands out of Amanda’s face. “I thought we didn’t need to shower here.”

“It’s part of the Entity’s motivation,” Amanda says. “It makes you angry, makes you hungry, makes you dirty, makes everything hurt. It gets better if you get good sacrifices. When it goes undernourished, so do we.”

“Survivors don’t,” Meg says. Amanda shrugs.

“I guess not being murdered is good enough motivation for most people to try their best,” she says pointedly. “I should put this back on.” 

“Leave it off, just for a little bit?” Meg asks. Amanda hesitates, but the sound of a gen lighting up across the map breaks the moment. Her head snaps around, and she shoves the mask back on before standing back up. 

“I have a job to do, Meg,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Did you really just think of us as meat?” Meg asks, surprising herself. Amanda looks silently down at her for a few long, tense seconds. 

“Yeah,” Amanda admits eventually, turning away. “John was the only one that mattered. I could’ve been his legacy, but I let him down. I won my first game, but my second killed me. No matter how many times you win here, you’ll always lose in the end. Sometimes I think some of you would’ve survived the games - the real ones, in the real world. You all want to live so badly, even when death is inevitable. You fight right to the end.” There’s a laugh from within the mask. “You’d’ve been a shitty apprentice, though, so we couldn’t have been friends. I can’t imagine you taking orders from anyone, not even John. And I was too possessive to share him, even with someone like you.” 

“That doesn’t sound like you thought of us as meat,” Meg says. She can feel Amanda’s scowl, even if she can’t see it. 

“I had to,” she says. “If you’re not meat, then you’re the same as me. I have to believe that surviving my trap  _ meant _ something. If it didn’t, then… then I might as well be one of you. You have to be just meat, waiting to be slaughtered, because otherwise I’m just.” Amanda slips a hand under the mask, pressing it against her face. “Otherwise I’m just a fucking murderer, like he said, and I never  _ meant _ anything. I’m- I’m fixed, and you’re all broken, he  _ fixed _ me. I beat  _ death _ , Meg, that meant something before I came here! I  _ beat death _ . I faced it and won. Not many others managed that shit! He loved me, he  _ loved _ me-”

Meg can see Amanda’s unravelling; she’s making less and less sense, sentences fragmenting, her train of thought stuttering and jolting into nonsense. Another generator switches on, closely followed by a third, and Amanda yanks her hand free of the mask. The moonlight reflects off moisture on her palm before she clenches it shut. 

“Fuck!” she curses. “I can’t afford another bad trial, I can’t look him in the eyes and watch him kill me again, I can’t fucking do this without him! I wanted us dead! He was meant to DIE before he knew he should’ve hated me, I can’t- I can’t see the disgust in his eyes again. I can’t do this!” Amanda whirls back around to face Meg, shoulders rising and falling as she pants. “I have to get a kill,” she says, and lunges. Meg scrabbles backwards, barely avoiding the blade; it churns up the dirt by her thigh and clicks against one of the spilled totem bones, Meg’s unexpected movement unbalancing Amanda so she has to hold the other hand out to catch herself. Fighting a wave of deja vu, Meg does the first thing she can think of, grabbing the mask by the hair and tearing it off. 

This time it doesn’t stop the killer; Amanda just lets out a haunted scream and launches towards her again, Meg scrambling clumsily to her feet and bolting, hearing the heavy footsteps and thudding heartbeat that mean Amanda is still pursuing her, maskless. Meg vaults the nearest window and feints running right before doubling back, automatically trying to lose her pursuer with every trick she knows. Amanda falls for it, appearing in the far doorway and scowling furiously at the sight of Meg too far away to swing at. 

“It doesn’t have to be like this, Amanda!” Meg shouts at her. Amanda just closes the distance between them and lashes out; Meg slams down the pallet between them, feeling a little bad when Amanda squeaks with pain and staggers backwards, clutching her head. Meg wonders if the mask usually dampens some of the impact.

“Bitch!” Amanda grits out, shaking her head and kicking at the pallet until it collapses. By the time she’s through, Meg has managed to run around a corner and hide in the long grass there, hoping Amanda will think she kept running and move right past her. “You can’t fucking run forever!”

_ I’m not trying to _ , Meg thinks to herself, stifling a giggle. The alcohol has pretty much burned off, adrenaline chasing it out of her system, but the urge to giggle inappropriately is lingering like it always does when she starts to sober up. Amanda sprints by and then stops, seeming to realise she’s lost the trail, and swears again, kicking a tree and clutching at her hair with both hands, a few loose strands getting caught on the knife and falling to the dirt. 

“Next time, I’m sacrificing you!” Amanda shouts, and kicks viciously at the tree once more before she sinks into a crouch, visibly gathering herself together. Meg watches, pressed between a rock and a tree, glad she’s wearing Claudette’s green shirt and Ace’s beige cap today, as she takes a moment to slow her breaths. Amanda’s facing away now, so she can’t see her expression, but gradually she lowers her shoulders, rolling them back, flicking the knife out and back in. Meg recognises the look of someone getting into the zone, even if usually that hasn’t been a murdery sort of zone, in her experience. 

Amanda creeps away, towards where a generator must be, and Meg just breathes. 

\--

Quentin comes back to consciousness in the middle of a cornfield, blinking mist from his eyes. At least this probably means it won’t be Freddy, he thinks optimistically, squinting for any sign that he might be in the Dream World and finding none. The optimism withers into dread when he hears a chainsaw rev in the distance and quickly become louder, signalling that today’s trial is one against the Hillbilly. It’s still better than being tormented by the man who abused him and killed his friends, if he had to pick, but being chainsawed hurts more than pretty much anything else. 

He knows that some of the others have chainsaw-dodging down to a fine art; David in particular seems to be able to lunge improbably out of the way at the last second, making the Hillbilly crash into whatever he was trying to pin David against, and Kate’s quick footwork makes her a pretty good distraction while the others try to do generators. David’s tried to teach the others his little dodge-sprint move, but the only ones who’ve had any real success are Ace, Jake and Kate. Quentin still feels like the weak link whenever he hears the chainsaw rev.

_ I wonder if Claudette’s in this trial,  _ he thinks, trying to channel Nea as he slinks over to a totem he can see a few feet away.  _ Maybe if she is, she can get through to him? The Pig recognised Amanda when they were both awake, and Claudette seems so sure that she has a chance at connecting with him again. Maybe it’ll be an easy trial. _

Holding onto religion has been tricky in this place, with the Entity being all godlike and inescapable, but Quentin still sends a little prayer up like he always does at the beginning of a trial in case He’s listening. Quentin thinks - hopes - that the Entity isn’t powerful enough to block prayers to the Almighty. 

The chainsaw roars again, not close enough for Quentin to need to start running, and there’s an agonised scream as someone - Tapp? Ace? - gets cut down, aura blood-red and vivid. Quentin finishes the totem, moving on to a generator nearby, and tries not to wince when Ace screams again as he’s hooked. Quentin glances over his shoulder to place him, already busy on the generator, and feels his stomach drop. 

Ace is in the basement. 

_ Thanks for nothing, _ he thinks at God bitterly, then feels guiltily blasphemous. The basement sucks with any Killer - the stairs are narrow enough that if they stick around, going in for a rescue is almost always a suicide mission - but the Hillbilly is more dangerous than most. He can cross the terrain in seconds when someone gets unhooked, reappearing when rescuer and rescuee are still only halfway up the stairs, and cut them both open. Quentin’s palms are sweating. The Hillbilly revs his chainsaw again and Quentin tenses to run, but the sound fades into the distance. A generator lights up, and Quentin hears a cry of pain but not, thank God, the chainsaw connecting with flesh and bone. The Hillbilly must have missed and resorted to his hammer. Quentin drops the wires in his hands and runs for the basement. 

Claudette’s already there, her footsteps loud and uneven as she runs down the stairs, limping slightly where her leg isn’t quite back up to full strength. Quentin follows her down, hoping that whoever the Hillbilly is chasing will keep him occupied for long enough for them to pull the rescue off. Ace is dangling from the hook; Claudette lifts him off, arms shaking, then leans for a second on the hook stand when her leg threatens to buckle. Ace grabs her arm and takes off running, stumbling up the stairs and pulling her behind him, half-dragging her when her leg buckles again and she lets out a choked whimper. “Go!” Claudette tells him, struggling to her feet again, and after a moment Quentin thinks  _ fuck it _ and just picks her up, thanking his dad for making him take swim classes. They all make it out of the shack, Claudette in his arms and Ace’s hand tucked into the crook of his elbow for support. Another scream echoes out, worryingly close, and Quentin sees Laurie fall through a nearby window, clutching her shoulder and sobbing. Quentin books it in the opposite direction, letting Claudette down once they’re behind cover and she can lean on one of the weird half-structures the Entity drops around the trial grounds while she heals Ace up. 

The Hillbilly got him good. There’s a churned-up gash across his back, left shoulder to right hip, bones and torn organs visible through the flesh. In the real world, Quentin doesn’t think he’d be able to ever walk again - the chainsaw caught a few of his vertebrae, bone fragments buried in the muscle around them. Quentin retches a little but opens his first aid kit, helping Claudette slow the bleeding with gauze and then holding the skin shakily together so she can stitch it quickly up. Ace’s face is pale with pain. 

“Thanks kids,” he says, grinning, though it looks more like a grimace. “You’re the best paramedic team a guy could ask for.”

“Just try to stay out of his way,” Claudette says, a familiar look of determination flitting into her eyes. 

“You’re gonna try to run distraction, aren’t you,” Quentin says, already knowing the answer. 

“I’m going to try talking to him,” she corrects. “Which, yes, is a distraction, but I think it could be more than that. You didn’t see him in the Nightmare; it was like he was about to say something. He  _ wants _ to talk to me.”

“Wasn’t interested in conversation with yours truly,” Ace says, as Laurie’s screaming silhouette becomes visible. They all make faces; she’s also in the basement. Claudette takes a deep breath, then lets it out in a woosh. 

“The Pig only talked to Meg,” she says. “The Hillbilly might only talk to me. The rest of you are just…”

“Big ol’ T-bone steaks,” Ace says without malice. “Yeah, I know. Good luck, kid.” 

“Just focus on doing gens,” she says, squeezing Ace’s hand and working her way upright. 

“I’ll get Laurie,” Quentin says. Claudette shakes her head. 

“I’ll get her,” she says. “He’ll come back when she’s unhooked, that’s my best chance at seeing him alone.”

“Your leg doesn’t like stairs,” Quentin points out. “I can get Laurie out, take her off somewhere to heal, and then when he comes back you’ll be waiting at the shack for him. I’ll heal Laurie and we’ll go work on gens while you try your uh, parlez.” 

Claudette considers, then concedes the point, and they head over together, Claudette’s hand on Quentin’s shoulder in case her leg buckles again. Claudette sits on the crates by the door as Quentin runs down, grabbing Laurie from the hook in one practised movement. She clenches her teeth, looking around them with unfocused eyes. 

“He’s across the map, but he just turned around,” she says, closing her eyes and leaning against Quentin as they hurry out of the basement, Claudette giving them a nervous wave and tossing her first aid kit to Quentin, who just manages to catch it without dropping Laurie. The chainsaw roars distantly. 

“Good luck,” Quentin says to Claudette as they pass her. She nods, obviously scared but steely-eyed. Laurie gives them both a questioning look, but lets Quentin lead her to where they healed Ace without asking.

“Shoulder’s dislocated, I think,” she says, when they’re behind the wall. “It felt like something snapped, but my arm’s not broken, and it hurts like hell.”

Quentin cuts carefully along the seam of her shirt and pulls it aside, wincing. “Yeah, that’s dislocated,” he agrees, looking at the bump where the bone has been displaced. “You want me to pop it back in?”

“That’s gonna hurt, right,” Laurie says, weary beyond her years, and Quentin feels his heart ache for her. 

“Not much,” he lies. “Just lie down for me?”

She does, and also steals Quentins hat to bite down on because he’s always been a terrible liar. 

“Deep breath,” Quentin says, trying desperately to remember his first aid training, then starts pulling firmly on her wrist. Laurie lets out an agonised groan, her eyes screwing shut, and Quentin bites his lip as he angles her arm so that the joint can slip back into position. After a minute or so it does, sweat dripping off both of them as Quentin sits back and helps Laurie sit up. 

“I’ll put it in a sling,” he starts, but she shakes her head. 

“Need both hands,” she says, spitting his beanie out. Quentin slips it into a pocket, ignoring the saliva soaked into the knit. “It’ll heal when we get out.”

“It’s going to be weak, and painful,” Quentin says, watching as she closes her eyes again and gently rotates her arm, forehead creased with pain but otherwise silent. Her fingers clumsily open and close. 

“Better two than one,” Laurie says grimly, but doesn’t use the arm to help herself stand up, holding it gingerly by her stomach. The hook wound must be hurting, but she waves him off when he reaches out to check it. “What’s Claudette doing?”

“Trying to talk to the Hillbilly,” Quentin says. Laurie blows out a breath. 

“We’re on gen duty?” she guesses, and at Quentin’s nod, sighs. “Let’s go.”

\-- 

“Pig’s not wearing her mask,” Nea whispers when Meg arrives at the generator she’s working on, in lieu of a greeting. “That anything to do with you?”

“Maybe,” Meg hedges, sticking her hands into the gen and getting to work. She’s raided 2 chests so far and cleansed two dull totems, and helped Tapp briefly on a gen before Amanda turned up and interrupted. Tapp was so surprised to see her without the mask that he didn’t run until it was too late, and got a slash across the face for it, and Meg feels a little guilty that she hadn’t thought to warn him about it. Without the pig mask, Amanda just looks like another survivor. Meg had bolted in the other direction, trusting Tapp to hold the Pig off for a while. Amanda’s always been quick and easy to anger, even before they knew she was just a person under the mask; Meg remembers slamming pallet after pallet into her, hearing her pained squeak every time, and grinning with the knowledge that an angry Pig was a sloppy one, that every tease made it more likely they’d all escape. Amanda’s furious and also desperate; Meg thinks Tapp will probably be able to loop her for a while with ease. 

“What is it with you and ripping off Killer’s masks?” Nea whispers, rolling her eyes. The generator clunks threateningly but doesn’t spark, but they both take the warning and focus on their work for a minute until it lights up. That makes two gens left, and still nobody trapped or hooked. Meg almost feels bad for Amanda, thinking of her gaunt eyes and lank hair, but shakes it off. 

They run to the next generator, abandoning stealth in favour of speed, and find Tapp already there, still bleeding sluggishly from the shallow facial wound but other than that, none the worse for wear. He gives them a stern nod instead of a smile.

“Pig lost me,” he says. “Didn't see much of her but she’s… younger than I expected. Just a kid, really.”

“A kid with a bigass knife,” Nea mutters, squatting down next to the generator and getting to work. Tapp’s already got it a quarter done; with all three of them working on it, they’ll be done in no time. Meg hopes that whoever’s in the trial with them is also on a generator. 

The generator lights up, klaxon sounding, and Amanda screams and leaps around a tree as they all bolt in different directions. 

“COME AT ME!” Nea shouts, flickering a flashlight at her and slamming her with a pallet while she’s blinded. Amanda lets out another little cry, pain and rage surrounding her like a physical force, then just stands at the pallet, staring at Nea. Nea looks uncomfortable. 

“Hey? I’m not complaining, but don’t you want to kill me?” Nea mimes stabbing. Amanda, almost obligingly, kicks at the pallet, but doesn’t follow when Nea bolts, disappearing into a maze of cars. She just keeps standing there, and then sits down cross-legged and leans on the pile of car debris next to her. Meg, who’s been hiding the whole time behind a different pile, can see her eyes are red and damp. She stands up. 

“Fuck off,” Amanda says viciously, her voice thick. “What, given up on the nicey-nice act? Come to gloat?”

“Sorry,” Meg says automatically. Amanda groans. 

“And you’re apologising again. Maybe you’re not actually nice, just stupid.”

“I can be both,” Meg says tentatively, walking slowly and carefully over. Amanda turns her head away and wipes furtively at her eyes. “Do pallets actually hurt?”

“Guess you really are just dumb, if you can’t figure that one out.” 

“You guys just always seemed so indestructible,” Meg admits. “I thought they were just to slow you down so we’d have a chance.”

“Brain damage does tend to slow you down,” Amanda spits, then looks stricken. 

“Amanda?” Meg says, alarmed to see that Amanda’s eyes have gone all teary again. She sits down opposite, mirroring Amanda’s position. Amanda avoids her eyes. 

“Fuck off,” she says again, but it sounds less threatening and more just… exhausted. 

“Sorry for running earlier,” Meg says. “I like you, but I like being not-murdered kinda more. We need to go up a couple friendship levels before I’ll die for you.”  


“We’re not  _ friends _ ,” Amanda says incredulously, glancing at Meg. “I regularly hunt and kill you.”

“Against your will,” Meg points out, pleased that Amanda’s made eye contact again. “Besides, everyone has flaws.”

“You’re insane,” Amanda says, barking out a laugh. “I thought  _ I _ was crazy, but you’re another fucking level. You’re crazy like I’ve never seen. You like me ‘less than you like not being murdered’, and yet here you are, talking to someone who wants to kill you like we’re old friends.” 

“I’m an optimist,” Meg says. Amanda snorts. 

“You’re a moron,” she says, but Meg thinks there’s affectionate exasperation in her voice. It’s a tone Meg’s been on the receiving end of a lot in her life. 

“And you’re a mess,” Meg says, shrugging. “Sounds like a match made in heaven, right?” 

“What do you want from me?” Amanda asks, her dark eyes fixed on Meg’s. “Why are you doing this?”

Meg tries her hardest not to blush at the intensity of her gaze, given the severity of the situation, and isn’t really sure if she succeeds. Maybe she can pass it off as still being drunk or something. Meg loves being the center of attention, thrives on it, but attention from pretty girls has always made her unusually nervous. Amanda looks awful, like she hasn’t eaten or showered or anything in years, and of course there’s the whole ‘murders me and my friends on the regular’ thing, but Meg knows herself well enough to know that she would’ve totally tried to make a move if they were still in the real world, if they weren’t in this situation. 

“Um,” Meg says, stalling. “I don’t know. I want to be friends, I guess.”

“You’re going to get me killed,” Amanda says. “For real. What do you think happens to people who don’t fill their quotas? This,” she gestures to the dark circles under her eyes, the way her cheekbones stick out against the skin, “is just the start. I have to feed the Entity or I’ll just waste away. Or it’ll do what it did to Evan to me, or something even worse. I’m so fucking tired of being here, but I don’t have a choice. You like being not-murdered more than you like me? Well, I’m in the same fucking boat.”

“Who’s Evan?” Meg asks, while her mind is processing all the new information. The final generator turns on, the exit gates lighting up, but Amanda stays on the ground. 

“The guy with the bear traps,” Amanda says. Meg ‘oh’s. 

“We call him the Trapper,” she says. “What did the Entity do to him?”

“You think he was born covered in scars, metal sticking out of him like that?” Amanda asks. “He calls it ‘the work’. He always says, ‘you’ve gotta do the work, or there’s consequences’. He’s the one who’s been here the longest, even if some of the others are from earlier in real life. The Entity figured out what it was doing on him.”

“Like a test dummy?”

“Don’t let him hear you call him that,” Amanda advises. 

“I wonder how it chooses who becomes a survivor and who becomes a Killer,” Meg wonders aloud. “I mean, if it had to torture him, then it probably had to torture some of the others before they would kill, right? So why didn’t it choose me, or Jake, or whoever?”

“Maybe it sensed that we’re evil,” Amanda says. “Knew we’d do it.”

“I think I’d probably do it too, if I was tortured by some giant spider god for a billion years or whatever. I don’t think that makes me evil?”

“Evan’s not that old,” Amanda says, amused. An exit gate klaxon sounds, and Meg stretches her neck to see Nea with her hand around the handle. Nea waves. Meg waves back. Amanda turns and stretches to look as well, and Nea waves again, then narrows her eyes and realises who she just waved at. 

“Oh, fuck!” 

“Come say hi!” Meg calls. Amanda glowers at her. 

“Uh, I dunno,” Nea says warily. “I don’t want to break up the party. Three’s a crowd, right?”

“I like a crowd,” Meg says. 

“It’s not you I’m worried about,” Nea says bluntly. The second red light comes on, another klaxon ringing out. 

“Feel free to fuck off and leave me alone now,” Amanda says as the exit gate bleeps a third time and slides open. Meg feels her mouth twist. 

“It’s gonna make you sick though, isn’t it? Not hooking any of us?”

“Yeah, so get out before I change my mind,” Amanda says. “I’ve got a totem up, you know. I could get you up on a hook quicker than you could blink.”

“But you haven’t,” Meg says. “Why?”

Amanda shrugs cagily, ignoring Nea as she sneaks closer even though Nea’s definitely in her peripheral vision. “Nice to have a conversation,” she says. “Don’t get it a lot.”

“You obviously talk to the other Killers,” Meg counters. “Why really?”

Amanda sighs. “I’m just sick of this shit,” she mutters, kicking at a clump of mud that’s been dislodged by their running. “I never  _ wanted _ to kill people, not at the start. I just wanted to make him proud. I thought this was my second chance at serving him properly, at continuing his work, but… he’d hate it here. He’d hate what I do. I don’t know how to keep living like this. He hated me because I twisted his message, but that’s all I’m doing here. Right?”

“What, John?” Meg says, thinking back to the nightmare. 

“I’m just a murderer, Meg,” Amanda says. “He fixed me, he saved me, and what did I give him in return? I fucked up, I tainted his legacy, I  _ killed  _ him because I was too fucking ashamed to let him find out what I’d done, that I’m the reason Gideon is dead-” Amanda’s crying suddenly, great wracking sobs that are shaking her whole body, and Nea is looking at Meg with wide, frightened eyes. “-and he would’ve hated me, and he was my whole fucking world, and he was a fucking liar! I did the same thing as he did, and he called me a murderer for it, even though he’s the one who taught me to fucking do it, because he did it to me!”

“Sounds like one fucked up relationship you guys had,” Nea offers from behind a pile of debris, far enough away that she’s still got a head start if Amanda goes for her. 

“Who’s Gideon?” Meg asks hesitantly. Amanda shakes her head, scratching bloody lines into her arm. Meg takes her hand and holds it, not letting go even when Amanda tries to yank it free by digging her nails into Meg’s palm instead. “You don’t have to answer that, sorry. Sore subject, yeah?”

Amanda chokes on a laugh. “Whatever,” she says, voice thick. “Fucking  _ Hoffman _ .”

“Hoffman?” says another voice, startled, and they all look up to see Tapp frozen in the exit gate. “How do you know Hoffman?”

“What, don’t recognise me?” Amanda says bitterly, pushing her hair out of her face with the hand Meg isn’t holding. Tapp takes a couple of steps forwards, squinting, and then his legs buckle. There’s nothing for him to catch himself on, so he just falls on his ass. Nea almost laughs but seems to think better of it. 

“Amanda  _ Young? _ ” he says. 

“You know her?” Meg asks incredulously. 

“You- I thought you’d OD’d or something, when we couldn’t get in contact with you again,” Tapp says, pale. “When Meg said the Pig was called Amanda, I never thought… how can you do this after what he did to you?”

“He saved me,” Amanda says defensively. “He changed my life. I was meant to continue that legacy.”

“He tortured you,” Tapp shouts. “He made you kill a man. You nearly  _ died! _ ” 

“Maybe I should’ve!” Amanda shouts back fiercely. “What the fuck did I ever do in life? I should’ve died in that stupid Reverse Bear Trap! I didn’t deserve to live! None of us do!” 

“All that time we were chasing him, and he was grooming you,” Tapp says, getting unsteadily to his feet. “To be like him, to do what he did to you to other people? He traumatised you and used that to make you into a killer too, and I never even noticed. I’m gonna be sick.” he blurts out at the end, and sits back down, pressing his mouth against his inner elbow and audibly swallowing. 

“You were in one of those Reverse Bear Traps?” Nea asks, serious and frowning. “Why the fuck would you put someone else through that shit? You’ve put me in one more times than I can count, at this point. You know what it feels like, having that timer tick down and knowing that your head’s going to be ripped open if you don’t cut your hands to pieces finding the key. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“How do you know Hoffman?” Tapp asks. It looks like he’s over his brief nausea; he’s back on his feet, and his face is tight and pinched like he’s bracing for impact. 

“Take a fucking guess,” Amanda sneers, ignoring Nea entirely. 

“He wasn’t assigned to your case,” Tapp says insistently. “How did you hear that name?”

“Guess what, Mister Detective,” Amanda says, her red-rimmed eyes narrowed with spite. “Hoffman was never on your fucking team. That piece of shit was working with John long before I came on the scene. And fuck,” she laughs hollowly, “he’s probably still fucking doing it while I’m stuck in here. He had a taste for blood, he liked watching the games. John being dead won’t stop that. I bet Hoffman’s  _ thrilled _ he got both of us out the way so he can step up and be Jigsaw. John would hate it.”

Meg realises why Tapp looked like he was expecting a blow; this Hoffman dude was obviously one of his colleagues, and the whole time he was working with the dude Tapp was trying to catch. 

“How long,” Tapp manages to get out, and Amanda shrugs. The fire is gone from her posture; she just looks tired.

“He was there when John did the barbed wire trap,” she says. “I dunno when they started working together officially. I don’t know  _ how _ they started working together. Hoffman hated my guts and the feeling was fucking mutual. We didn’t chat around the fucking water cooler.”

“Christ,” Tapp says faintly. 

Meg looks at Amanda, at her puffy eyes and lank hair and, when she glances at their twined fingers, the thick scars running across her wrist that are painfully familiar. There’s nothing but despair and grief in her eyes, that much is painfully obvious, and Meg thinks back to before she found running, when she was driving herself towards an edge that she thinks Amanda fell over. Running saved Meg’s life, she’s pretty sure; she has scars just like Amanda’s in uneven rows along her hips and thighs, long-healed but there forever. There were a few months where she drank every day until her head was spinning just to keep going. If Coach hadn’t recognised her potential and picked her out of the crowd…

Maybe their positions would be reversed. 

“Come with us,” Meg says, impulsively. 

“What?” everyone else says, almost in unison, almost in the exact same disbelieving tone. 

“Are you insane?” Nea says. Meg can count the number of times she’s seen Nea so openly surprised on one hand, and none of those have been outside trials before now.

“Meg,” Tapp says, warning. Amanda grins. 

“What the fuck,” she says, again, “is wrong with you?”

“Think about it,” Meg says, warming to the idea. “You don’t want to be a Killer anymore, right? So become a Survivor. Leave the trial with us, come back to the campfire. Surely the Entity won’t care if you switch teams? It still gets fed, or whatever. You can come be with us. You wouldn’t have to be alone anymore, you wouldn’t have to kill anyone anymore.”

“Meg,” Tapp says again, somewhere between angry and just bemused. 

“I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Amanda says, rolling her eyes, even though she’s still smiling. “The exit gates only let survivors out. Killers can’t go through. Or didn’t you notice that?” She sighs. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Yeah, but if you decided to come with us, you wouldn’t  _ be _ a Killer anymore, right? So by default, you’d be a Survivor, and it would let you through. I mean, that’s just a theory, but… it could work, right?”

“But then every Killer would just decide to go through and follow us,” Nea says. 

“No, no, see, they want to follow us to hurt us. The Entity blocks the way because the trial is over, because we’ve escaped, so if her  _ intent _ changed, if she viewed herself as a Survivor instead of a Killer, it’d let her through, right? Like, the only reason we get through is because our intent was to escape, to get back to the campfire to safety, because that’s our reward for doing well in the trial and we  _ know _ it’ll let us through. If Amanda focused on feeling like a Survivor, on wanting to escape with us and go to the campfire, maybe it would confuse her for a Survivor and let her escape. She could leave the mask off, take my hand, maybe injure herself so it’d be more likely to fool the Entity. Killers don’t get properly injured in trials. Can you even cut yourself with your knife?”

“Not accidentally,” Amanda says hesitantly. “And I’ve never tried to do it in a trial.”

Meg tactfully ignores the implication that Amanda’s tried it outside of a trial. “Try it now,” she urges, letting go of Amanda’s hand - fuck, they’d really been holding hands this whole time? Meg fights off a blush. She’d completely forgotten somehow. Amanda sets the knife against her wrist, over the scars there, and Meg hastily pushes her hand so it rests against the base of her thumb instead. “No point falling back into bad habits,” she says lightly. Amanda gives her a heavy, pointed look, but just pushes the tip of the knife into the skin. It breaks, blood beading and dripping off her wrist. Nea gasps, pressing a hand to her chest, and Tapp’s face loses the little colour it had started to gain back. 

They’ve all got a kind of sense - it doesn’t always work, especially if they’re focused on something else like doing a generator, but it’s generally pretty reliable - that lets them know that another Survivor is wounded. When Amanda’s blade pierced her skin, that alarm had gone off in Meg’s chest like it would for Nea, or Tapp, or any of the others. Amanda looks warily between them. 

“What? It’s just a knife doing what it should,” she says. 

“Holy shit,” Nea breathes. 

“Come on!” Meg says, grabbing Amanda’s hand again and tugging until she stands up, visibly bewildered. 

“Meg, are you sure we should be doing this?” Tapp says quickly, standing between them and the door with his hands raised. “Listen, I get that you’re trying to be friends with her, or whatever, but this woman has killed us all before. The campfire is a safe space. Are you sure you want to break that sanctity?”

“There’s no way I’m getting through that fucking barrier,” Amanda says, “so there’s no point even arguing about it.”

“Trust me,” Meg says to her, then turns to Tapp. “She doesn’t deserve to live like this forever. And come on, one less Killer is a good thing for everyone!”

“Getting killed over and over is better?” Tapp shoots back. “Making everyone live with someone who has  _ ripped their faces apart _ is better? I’m not sacrificing the happiness of the team for one murderer, no matter how much I wish we weren’t in this position in the first place.”

“We felt her injury!” Meg protests. “That’s got to mean something!”

“It doesn’t mean shit,” Nea says, though she looks miserable saying it. “Maybe the realm is just confused because this whole trial is going so weird.”

“You felt it?” Amanda asks. “So that’s why you all come running to each other when we hit you.”

Of course! Meg turns back to Amanda and grabs her left hand. “Look,” she says, and slices the blade down her own palm. 

“Ow, fuck,” Amanda says, pressing her other hand to her sternum. 

“Oh, shit,” Nea says faintly. 

“See!” Meg crows, giddy with being  _ right _ . “Come on, ‘Manda, you can come with us! Let’s get out of here!”

“I don’t belong with Survivors,” Amanda says, pulling her hand back, studying the blood on the blade. “I’m a Killer. That’s what he made me, that’s what I chose to be, and that’s all I’ll ever be.” She smiles awkwardly at Meg. “I’m ready to die,” she admits. “I never thought I’d say that - passing my test made me want to live more than I think I’ve ever wanted to - but… I think I’d be okay with it, if the Entity just undid me. I’m nothing without him anyway.” 

Meg grabs both her hands in her own, ignoring the spike of pain as her wounded palm jolts against Amanda’s. “Listen to me. Your worth doesn’t hinge on some dude who tortured you and then made you fucking kill people. You can exist without him, you can change, you can grow. Maybe you were right and this is a second chance, but it’s not meant for you to keep doing what he wanted. It’s time to live for you, Amanda.”

Amanda’s silent for a moment. “I don’t know who I am without him,” she admits. “I don’t know how to live without living for him.” 

“Then it’s time you fucking learned,” Meg says, reaching up to cup Amanda’s face. “You were someone before him, right? You can be someone after him, too.” 

Amanda doesn’t say anything for a moment, just looking Meg in the eye like she’s looking for something. There’s something sharp and glittering in Amanda’s gaze, like broken glass, like she could shatter or draw blood in a moment. It’s mesmerising. Amanda’s eyes dart to Meg’s mouth for a second. 

“Okay,” she says simply. 

Meg releases a breath she didn’t realise she was holding. “Okay?”

“This isn’t a Fault in our fucking Stars,” Amanda says. Nea barks out a laugh, then looks startled by it. Amanda takes a step back from Meg, looking suddenly embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“I still don’t like it,” Tapp says, his face hard. “If I even think you’re going to hurt someone on my team, I’ll take you the fuck down.”

“Okay,” Amanda says simply. Tapp doesn’t relax. 

“We don’t even know if it’ll work yet,” Nea says. Meg takes Amanda’s hand and tugs her towards the open gate; she follows, closely trailed by Nea. When they pass Tapp, Amanda looks at him for a long, intense moment, then averts her eyes. 

“It’ll work,” Meg says. “We just gotta believe in it.” 

“For the record,” Nea says to Amanda, “I’m going along with this because I trust Meg. She’s a good person, and I’m hoping that she’s right to be this optimistic about you, because I want to believe that we’ve got a chance at actually allying with Killers. But if you fuck this up even once, I’ll be on your ass so hard you’ll wish Tapp was instead. Yeah?”

Amanda smiles, and it looks almost genuine, if not for the still haunted look to her dark eyes. “You got it, baby,” she says, and the smile slides into a smirk when Nea grins back. 

“You better not fuck this up, because I’m kinda starting to think I could like you,” Nea says. “You’ve got like, 20 RBT deaths to make up for though, so. Don’t think I’m forgetting that shit. You’re gonna have to give me every good flashlight you find until I decide we’re square. But if you don’t fuck up before then, you’ve got a chance.” 

“Good to know,” Amanda says. Her smile fades. “It’s the least I deserve,” she adds quietly, and Meg clutches her hand a little tighter. There isn’t anything left to say, and her throat is tight with nerves anyway, so she just walks forward, Amanda pulled along by their joined hands, and steps out of the trial without looking back. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) meg's strategy of booking it and then hiding doesn't sound particularly good, and doesn't work most of the time in-game vs higher rank killers, but as lightweight is one of her perks (iirc?) her scratch marks fade quickly enough that it's a fairly solid strategy, at least in the canon of this fic. :P
> 
> 2) i've always been meandering my way towards an amanda redemption arc, because her story is so tragic and i truly believe that she deserved better than everything she did and went through, and also i love her. BUT after reading the latest chapter of ziracona's in living memory (which is an AMAZING fic, please go check it out!), my heart was broken, and i decided that that redemption arc is starting RIGHT NOW! you're all welcome. i love amanda young. you all better love her too or i'm coming for you
> 
> 3) amanda's feelings towards john are very complex. she has several different opinions and feelings, and they war for dominance within her at any given moment - it's been long enough that she no longer blindly believes in john, she's seen how a lot of what he did and said didn't add up, and her love and grief wars with her anger and hurt and self-loathing. if it seems like she's contradicting herself, that's because she is! recovery from trauma, especially one with such strong trauma-bonding and repeated trauma, is a very complicated and confusing process. 
> 
> 4) i'm apparently like, the only person on the meg/amanda wagon, but i've been quietly on it for months, and now you all have to ride in it with me. sorry not sorry!
> 
> thank you all for reading!! love you guys


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claudette strengthens a connection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw for implied child abuse (& the general concept of feral children, which is a hard-hitting topic. don't look into it if you're particularly sensitive!) and the usual ingame level of injury!

Claudette watches Laurie’s silhouette through the wall of the killer shack as Quentin leads her to safety, seeing as she lies down and her injured arm stretches out to the side. It must be dislocated; Claudette frowns in sympathy, even though Laurie of course can’t see her. The noise of the chainsaw is rapidly getting closer, and Claudette’s heart is hammering so hard that her head is swimming. The alcohol is making it both better and worse; she’s braver than she would have expected from herself, Dutch courage, but if this comes down to a chase then Max will be able to catch her easy as breathing. She has to do this, though. Even if she dies, at least they’ll be able to rule out one Killer as a potential ally, and if she doesn’t… 

Well, that’s too big to think about. Claudette’s not even sure what will happen if she and Max can become… friends? Privately, she thinks that probably none of the others have much of a plan either. They’re running mostly on hope. 

The chainsaw screeches to a grinding halt against the doorway of the shack, a grunt echoing through the confined space as its user trips with the suddenness of the stop. Claudette looks up, her palms sweaty, and makes eye contact with Max from her position perching on a crate. Max stares back, and she’s not sure, but he looks startled. His eyes - which are glowing orange today, for whatever reason - dart down to her leg, then back up to meet her gaze. Claudette swallows. 

“Hey, Max,” she says, voice trembling with nerves but as gentle as she can make it. “Remember me?”

Max’s hands spasm open and the chainsaw and hammer drop to the floor with a heavy clatter. “Claw!” he says, with his growling, wet voice. 

“Claudette!” Claudette says. “It’s me, do you remember? I was in your dream.” 

Max comes rushing towards her, fear sending adrenaline flooding through her veins; Claudette half-falls off the crate and braces herself to run, in case he’s forgotten that he dropped his weapons and is trying to attack, but instead he stops just before her, grabbing her upper arms with rough, mangled hands. 

“Dandelion!” Max exclaims. He sounds, if Claudette was going to hazard a guess, excited. “Claud! Claudette!”

Relief floods through her so powerfully that her legs buckle, and she has to clutch Max’s forearms to stay upright. “You do remember!” she says, grinning, and Max bounces on the spot, his breath rasping and phlegmy with his excitement. 

“Flower!” Max growls, letting go of Claudette with one hand to stick it into the pocket of the ripped shirt he’s wearing, red plaid little more than shreds clinging to his body. “Claudette!”

He presents his hand, palm upwards, and Claudette sees that in it he’s holding a crumpled dandelion, soil clinging to the roots where it’s been ripped from the ground. The leaves are crushed and bruised, the flower leaking yellow onto his skin, but she can tell that the lopsided grimace on his face is a smile. Her heart is still hammering in her ears so hard that it’s making her dizzy, but she reaches out and touches it, grinning at him when he lets out an almost-squeal and claps his hands together as soon as she’s holding it instead of him. 

“You picked this for me?” she guesses, and at the rapid bobbing of his head, feels her heart melt a little. “Thank you, Max, I love it.”

Max bounces again, the childish gesture somewhat bizarre on such a giant, frightening creature, and then drops to the floor, his uneven shoulders twisting uncomfortably as he sits. “Leg!” he says, grabbing for Claudette’s ankle. 

“Gentle!” Claudette says sharply, and he retracts his hand, nodding. 

“Gentle,” he agrees. “Leg?”

“Almost all better,” Claudette says, pulling her trouser leg up to show the line of scar tissue wrapping around just under her knee. It’s thin and pale now, healed past being twisted and painful. Max makes a sad little noise. 

“Hurt,” he says. “Made for hurt.” 

“You’re not hurting me now,” Claudette says, sitting cross-legged opposite him and taking his large hands in hers. “See? This isn’t hurting. This is good, Max. You’re good. Remember gentle? You can be gentle. Like this.” Claudette brushes her fingertips across Max’s palms, watching with a heavy heart as he shivers, transfixed. 

“Feels good, right?” she coaxes. Max looks at her, glowing eyes intense. 

“Good,” he admits, and touches a hesitant fingertip to her palm. He flinches back, as though expecting to be punished for the contact, but Claudette just runs her fingers along his wrist in as soothing a motion as she can manage. “Good.” 

Her heartbeat drops abruptly quieter, and it’s as though the trial isn’t even happening for a second - no hammering in her ears, no fear dogging her every step, just her and Max sitting together, learning how to exist with each other. Then Max’s head whips round, staring at a point to their right. 

“Machine,” he says urgently, scrambling to his feet. “Stop machine!” 

“It’s okay, Max!” Claudette says, pulling herself up and reaching for his arm. “Don’t worry about the generators, just stay here with me-”

It’s too late; Max has run to the doorway, hurrying to pick up his chainsaw, and is revving it, agitated. The generator lights up and he makes a noise of dismay, whirling around to face Claudette again. “Bad!” he says. “Bad!” The heartbeat strikes up again, shockingly intense after the quiet, and his ragged breathing and the chainsaw’s scream combines with it into a terrible cacophony that sends a stab of pain through Claudette’s still-tipsy brain. She stumbles a little. “Max, wait- fuck!”

Max is gone, the chainsaw fading into the distance as it tugs him along with it, and Claudette is left holding a ragged dandelion, her throat tight. “Fuck!” she says again, resisting the urge to kick the crate only because she knows it would hurt her more than she can probably take right now, drunk and with her leg still healing. Another generator lights up, but Max obviously didn’t catch whoever was at the other one; nobody lights up yellow in Claudette’s vision, and no cry of pain carries across the cornfield. Claudette hurries out of the shack to find another generator, and comes quickly across Ace and Laurie working on one with drawn, tight expressions of concentration. Relief floods both their faces at the sight of her. 

“Lost him, kid?” Ace asks. Claudette shakes her head, crouching down to speed the repair along. 

“He didn’t try to hurt me,” she explains. “We were talking and then the generator went off and he panicked and ran.”

“Panicked?” Laurie says thoughtfully. There’s blood staining the front of her jumper, black in the poor lighting. “Maybe he’ll be easier to loop, if he’s panicking.”

Ace slots a last cog into place and the generator screams to life, Claudette following Ace and Laurie as they take off running. Laurie’s holding a map and moving with purpose, so she assumes they have a generator in mind. Quentin screams across the map, but isn’t on the floor, so they don’t hesitate, running until they find the generator Laurie was taking them to. Claudette’s heartbeat picks up a little, and after a minute Laurie stands and points. When she squints, Claudette can just make out Quentin’s stumbling figure followed by the Hillbilly’s lopsided gait in the near distance. Claudette takes off running. 

“Claudette!”

She ignores Ace’s call and keeps going. She’s not as fast as Meg or David, but she’s fast enough to reach Quentin just as he slams a pallet down on Max’s head, grunting with the effort and bleeding from his side, where Claudette can see some of his ribs have been concaved by the sledgehammer’s blow. Max lets out a yell of pain, then straightens up and revs the chainsaw to break the pallet, but stops when he sees her. Claudette pushes Quentin behind her, shielding him with her body and giving Max the sternest look she can manage. 

“Gentle, Max,” she says firmly. The chainsaw revs again, smashing the pallet to pieces, but Claudette stands firm even as Max lurches towards her. Quentin flinches, but reaches out and links their hands. 

“Hurt,” Max insists, though he doesn’t hit her. “Made to hurt. Gentle  _ Claudette. _ ”

“You can be gentle to him, too,” Claudette says. “Not just to me. Remember how good gentle feels?” She lifts the hand locked with Quentin’s, squeezing briefly tighter when his arm shakes with the effort of lifting it while injured, and brushes their knuckles against Max’s ridged shoulder. He flinches back, eyes on Quentin. 

“Work,” Max says. “Do the work.”

“The work? What’s the work?”

“The trials?” Quentin asks. Max nods. 

“Do the work,” he says again. “Work or hurt.” 

“You get hurt if you don’t do well in trials?” Claudette asks, and when Max nods, she frowns. If the Killers get punished for poor performance, that would explain why some of them are alternately merciful and vicious; the Huntress and the Wraith in particular can either be deadly or an easy trial, and none of them have been able to figure out why before. And that would explain why the Huntress hooked Kate that one time even though she was crying, obviously not wanting to do it. Claudette wonders how many of the Killers only work under extreme duress. Everyday existence is hard enough underneath the Entity; she can’t imagine what it might do to  _ punish _ . 

“If I let you hook me,” Claudette says, ignoring Quentin’s immediate protest, “will you get punished still?” 

“Gentle Claudette,” Max says, shaking his head. “No hook. Hurt leg, gentle now.” 

“Would you still get punished?” Claudette insists. Max bounces a little on the spot in agitation. 

“Don’t know,” he says. “Need two? Hit machines, kill two, break pallet. Good chase. Spider like chase.” 

“So you don’t need to kill all of us? Just two?”

“Better all,” Max says. “Two… okay?”

“Okay,” Claudette says, thinking. “So if you sacrifice me and someone else, and we let you kick the generators, and you chase us but don’t hit us, just break the pallets, the Entity won’t be upset with you?” 

Max thinks for a moment, glowing eyes downcast. “Don’t know,” he says. 

“Can we try? You can meet the others, and we can talk, and um, hang out? And then you can sacrifice me, and whoever else you need to, but we can have a nice time before that instead of you having to hunt us and us having to run from you.”

“No machines,” Max says. “Machine later.”

“We can stop doing the generators until we’re done,” Claudette promises. “Gentle? For a while?” 

“Do bad, hurt, Spider…” Max struggles for words for a moment. “Make me angry. Hurt more.”

“So… if you don’t get enough sacrifices it makes you angry? So you hunt us more efficiently? That’s okay. We’ll deal with that if it comes. If you hurt us, I know that you don’t want to. We’ll know, and we’ll forgive you. Right?”

“Right,” Quentin echoes nervously, his breaths ragged with pain. Max fidgets. 

“Max?” Claudette coaxes, holding out her empty hand, palm up. The generator Laurie and Ace were working on lights up, and Max jolts towards it, but Claudette steps to the side so she’s still in his line of vision. “I’ll get them to stop, Max, they won’t do any more generators for a while, yeah? Take my hand, we’ll go find them, and they’ll stop lighting the machines up.” 

Max hesitates again, but attaches the chainsaw to the loop on his belt and reaches out, his scarred, twisted skin against her palm a sharp contrast to Quentin’s soft hand in the grip of her other one. 

“You’re crazy,” Quentin whispers to Claudette under his breath, low so Max can’t hear. Claudette grins at him, feeling a little lightheaded with success. 

“Laurie! Ace!” she calls. “It’s safe! Can you come out? Please trust me?”

A few minutes and a lot of calling later, Ace’s head pokes out from behind a tree, followed by Laurie’s. 

“We got a ceasefire, kid?” Ace calls. 

“Yeah!” Claudette calls back. Max’s hand flexes in hers, but he doesn’t let go or pull away, just casts her an anxious look. It would be almost funny, this monstrous creature being frightened of two regular people, if not for the knowledge that the situation is so serious. 

“I’m not coming closer,” Laurie calls. “I’m staying right by this pallet.”

“That’s okay!” Claudette says. “Ace, are you coming over?”

“Sure,” Ace says, in that effortlessly casual way he has even when Claudette knows he’s terrified or in huge amounts of pain, and saunters over, grinning loosely. 

“Max, this is Ace,” Claudette says. “Gentle, remember?”

“Gentle Ace,” Max confirms. “Gentle Claudette.”

“Gentle Quentin,” Quentin says pointedly, pointing to himself. Max nods. 

“Ace, can you do me a favour and show Max your playing cards for a second? I need to bandage Quentin’s side.” 

“Sure thing,” Ace says lightly, and Claudette wishes he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses so she could see his eyes. He’s so hard to read with them on. “Max, right? You ever played poker?” Max shakes his head, still holding Claudette’s hand. “You wanna put that hammer down and I’ll show ya?”

Max drops the sledgehammer in the grass after a brief hesitation, and when Claudette pulls her hand away he lets her, though he does cling for a moment with a panicked little growl. Claudette smiles at him. “Go with Ace,” she says. “He’s nice.”

It takes a little more time before he does, following Ace to a nearby pile of debris and watching, head tilted, as Ace deftly shuffles his cards and begins dividing them into piles. Claudette turns to Quentin and reaches for his shirt, pulling it up and wincing when she sees the impact site. There’s already bruising forming, ugly reds and purples marring his skin, and she can see where the skin split under the force of the blow and is letting the broken bone peek through. 

“I think it’s just the bottom two,” Quentin says, breathing heavily through his nose. “It’ll heal okay once we’re out of the trial. It’s just gonna suck for now.”

“I’ll clean and bandage it, at least,” Claudette says, getting to work. She glances over at Ace and Max to find both of them bent over the cards, Ace still obviously making sure to leave room between them just in case. Quentin follows her gaze. 

“So what’s the deal with him?” he asks. “He’s a Killer, and he  _ has _ killed us all before, and he doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing that - or he hasn’t before, at least - but he talks like a kid and his body language looks like, weirdly nervous right now, and he listened to you like you were his mom or something.”

Claudette tapes the edges of the gauze down, frowning when blood immediately starts seeping through. “What I wouldn’t give for an anti-hemorrhage right now,” she says wistfully, then sighs. “Have you heard of feral children?”

“No,” Quentin says. 

“It’s… essentially, when a child is neglected or abandoned or severely abused from a young age, and they’ve been isolated from normal human contact, so they usually can’t speak or sometimes do basic things like walk upright. A lot of feral children were raised by animals and have more animalistic traits; there was a girl in Russia who was raised by dogs, and she barked, walked on all fours, that kind of thing. Like Mowgli, from the Jungle Book. Some were just locked away, and just don’t have anything to work off of. Genie is the most famous case of a feral child, but her case is… I won’t tell you the details. I had nightmares for weeks after reading about it. But essentially she was locked up from a young age in a room where she couldn’t walk and nobody ever talked to her or really… did anything besides feeding her. When she was found she couldn’t walk, talk, feed herself… anything, really. It was horrific. She’d been abused and alone for so long that she didn’t know how to be human, and she was profoundly mentally handicapped. She learned how to speak a little when she was older, but she never would’ve been able to recover fully from her trauma.”

“That’s awful,” Quentin says faintly. “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Claudette says, trying not to remember any further details. “And I’m telling you this because, in the Nightmare, I was in what looked like a basement, with no light or furniture or anything, just a bucket and a pile of old blankets. Max was a child when the Nightmare started, curled up in this pile of blankets so completely that he wasn’t even visible. He was frightened of me, and he barely even knew his own name. And you’ve heard how he talks.”

“You think he might’ve been a feral child,” Quentin says, glancing over at Ace and Max. Max is holding four cards in his hands, squinting intently at them while Ace points something out on them. Laurie is still keeping her distance, but she’s moved a little closer, watching avidly. 

“I’m almost certain,” Claudette says. “And that kind of childhood… it wouldn’t have been hard for the Entity to get to him and make him a killer. He might have never known anything except the basement and here. He’s like a blank slate.”

“He called Trials the ‘work’,” Quentin says, “which doesn’t sound like something he’d know about, if he was feral. Working, I mean.”

“I was thinking that the Killers might talk to each other like we do,” Claudette says. “Or maybe that’s what the Entity has told him. I don’t know if he knows, properly, that hurting people is bad. He knows what gentle means, and he knows to apply it to us, but that’s only because I told him. I don’t think he really understood that we were… real, or something, before the Nightmare.”

“Because he didn’t have any human contact before he came here,” Quentin says, understanding. “So he didn’t know that what he’s been doing is wrong, because that’s what he’s been told to do and he’s never been shown anything different.”

“Exactly,” Claudette says, nodding. “Really, it’s lucky that he’s been so receptive. A lot of feral children aren’t responsive, they don’t engage with people. Maybe he had a few years before he was abandoned, so he kept some knowledge of language and humanity.”

“So he’s like a little kid with a chainsaw,” Quentin says, frowning. “That’s one hell of a combo.”

“Every child wants love and kindness, even if they aren’t capable of understanding what that means or how to get it,” Claudette says. “I think a little will go a long way, and even getting hooked wouldn’t be so bad if it was only once and we didn’t have to spend the rest of the trial scared out of our minds. And if he really is a feral child…” Claudette looks over at Max, who’s curling up into himself a little, the cards held out for Ace to take. Ace takes them, saying something, and Max shakes his head, burying his face in his knees. “He doesn’t deserve to be here,” she continues. “I can’t imagine living here without knowing anything good beforehand. The thought of it makes my heart ache like it’s breaking.”

“The Entity is straight-up evil,” Quentin says, gritting his teeth as Claudette finishes taping the gauze down and it presses down on the wound. “Not that I ever forget that, but uh… if that’s true, and it did this to him because he didn’t know anything better, then that’s even more fucked up than what it’s done to us. At least I had a life before I came here. It kinda sucked, sometimes, and I’m not saying high school was  _ fun _ , but at least I got to experience it. I had a life.”

Claudette checks the dressing one last time, then helps him up. She can see Max is still shaking his head, curled up like he was in the blankets in the basement, and Ace is giving her a worried look. “Come on,” she says, nodding at Ace. “We’ve got a killer to befriend.”

**Author's Note:**

> please kudos and comment if u enjoyed this chapter!! comments really do make my day & encourage me to continue writing! <3 catch me on tumblr @chained2012, or feel free to donate thru my kofi, katzacore, if u like what i'm doing (or want to commission me for a dead by daylight piece :>). thanks!!


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